This is getting ridiculous

A few years ago, an issue in the Virginia gubernatorial race centered on Critical Race Theory and parents' rights to control what their kids were reading in school. The centerpiece on this issue was a mother whose son had apparently suffered greatly, nearly a decade earlier, by having to read Toni Morrison's Beloved for his AP English class. 

Beloved is disturbing. 

But if you're 18 years old and capable of taking AP English, and you get the vapors from reading Toni Morrison, then maybe you have no business taking AP English. Stick with Chemistry. Stick with Latin. 

Beloved, of course, appears frequently on banned book lists. So does her novel The Bluest Eye. So does The Diary of Anne Frank. And 1984. And Fahrenheit 451, which - oh, irony of ironies - is about book burning. 

But books that deal with LGBTQ+ issues are pretty much edging all other books out when it comes to getting banned. 

Thus we find ourselves (or at least would, if we lived in Alabama) at the point where this can happen:

“Read Me a Story, Stella” is a children’s picture book about a pair of siblings reading books together and building a doghouse. However, because the author’s name is Marie-Louise Gay, the book was added to a list of potentially “sexually explicit” books to be moved from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HCPL) system. (Source: AL.com)

Talk about 'don't say gay.' If I were the type of coarse, non-refined lady who uses the sort of strong language that children under the age of 50 should never be exposed to, I'd say FFS. Or maybe WTF.

HCPL executive director Cindy Hewitt admitted “Read Me a Story, Stella” should not have been put on the list and was added because of the keyword “gay.”

“Obviously, we’re not going to touch that book for any reason,” Hewitt said...Hewitt insists there was never any intention to target the LGBTQ community. Instead, she was hoping to be “proactive instead of reactive.”

There were 232 other books "slated to be removed and potentially moved," so "Read Me a Story, Stella" was in good company.

It wasn't all LGBTQ topics that were on the chopping block. Another book earmarked for review is "The Hate U Give," which is about a Black kid who's killed by a cop. 

But of the 233 titles up for ban, 91 deal with LGBTQ+ topics. So those words about no "intention to target the LGBTQ community" ring a tad bit hollow.

Whether it's gay or Black or other themes that some people are objecting to - and I can't recall the details, but I read recently about some woman crusading against a book she hadn't bothered to read, but just knew in her heart of hearts, her mind of minds, was bad - the increasing number of books being banned is truly terrible.

No one's arguing that kindergartners should be exposed to porn, but by the time someone's in high school (maybe even junior high), there should be no books off limits for readers other than porn and violent trash that has no redeeming literary value. But what's porn? What's violent trash?

Guess I'm with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, way back in the 1960's, was asked about his litmus test for what constitutes pornography. Stewart famously answered "I know it when I see it."

On the other hand, while I trust my own judgment, do I want some prude-y smother-mother deciding that Beloved is too much for her sensitive 18 year-old to deal with, and, thus, should be banned from schools?

By all means, put the difficult reads in the adult section of the public library. But setting up a process where a book by an author named Gay can be swept up in a hunt for the ban-able is just ludicrous. 

FFS.

WTF.