I live in a very conservative area but other than a nearby school district banning the Harry Potter books for witchcraft some years ago it has been quiet since the days when James Dobson's minions picketed the local bookstore in the eighties. I bought my only copy of "Hustler" just so I could walk out past them with it out of the bag. Now the local schoolboard has overruled the professionals to remove "Genderqueer" from the high school library bookshelves by a 4 to 3 vote. Only one of the four is currently up for re-election. Other districts in the county have slates of candidates who have pledged similar actions as well as banning critical race theory. I already filled out my ballot, not voting for the offender. I've reserved the book from the public library so I can discuss it intelligently if the occasion arises. I'm not sure what else I can do but I find this sort of thing frightening.
culture wars on the home front
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Cancel Culture at its worst
Hypocrisy at its worst as they complain about people 'cancelling' their point of view.
Up theirs!
Banning books like Harry
Banning books like Harry Potter is just censorship. Censorship is a step towards totalitarianism. And big religious sects are a prime target for subversion attempts by totalitarian minded people, because there are huge amounts of loot involved (money and power) and many of the followers are very naive and believe everything their leaders tell them ("it's written in the holy book, so it has to be true"). Therefore science and free thinking are the arch enemies of those leaders, because they threaten their loot and are thus suppressed wherever possible.
Banned stuff
One of the things I think the group is called Moms for liberty pushed and got banned was “girls who code” book series. I mean what the actual fuck there are just no words.
hugs :)
Michelle SidheElf Amaianna
It always strikes me as odd
It always strikes me as odd that in the "land of the free" Things get banned for religious reasons.
You are free to buy incredibly dangerous weapons and are trusted that you won't use them on each other. Yet not trusted to buy a Harry Potter book in case you "turn to satan"?
We don't do that in the UK unless it is hate speech. But we are not free to buy incredibly dangerous weapons. The official state religion is the Church of England. It tends to steer clear of politics.
There never seems to be much political pressure from religious groups. I assume the reason is many people went to America in the past for religious reasons, which seem to run deep still in the 21st century.
Leeanna
Because N Americans speak a subset of English ...
... (joke) we tend to think they are more like we in the UK than they really are. When we cycle toured in Mass and New Hampshire nearly 30 years ago (gulp) we experienced tremendous hospitality far beyond from what one might expect (although cycling does tend to bring you closer to the natives wherever you tour from the Americas to Asia). However, there were oddities.
Neither of us is a big drinker but we're not teetotal so the habit of 'brown bagging amused us greatly - camp sites where alcohol is banned and (in N Carolina on a second trip) having to buy spirits from a state liquor store rather than the supermarket seemed almost like being in a communist country. 21 as the minimum age for drinking is a bit excessive when 18 year olds are considered adults. Both my wife and I were living independently of our parents as teens - luckily we also had no money :) (we didn't meet until our late 20s)
In the UK religion (at least amongst those not of recent immigration communities) is quite rare. Very few people go to church except for hatch, match or despatch reasons. I'm of an age when I attend a lot of funerals and most are non-religious which I find much more satisfying. The sort of book banning by religious groups described here is horrifying. I'm no Harry Potter fan (a bit before my time) but if they're going to ban all books that include witchcraft they've a long way to go. As a teen I used to read a lot of Dennis Wheatley who goes quite a bit further than J. K. Rowling. It really is nonsense.
Despite my French being a bit iffy, I certainly feel more at home in France than I did in the USA and wish we were still in the EU. Mind you, the political chaos of the UK and USA seem to be converging at the moment. At least the US president has lasted longer than our recent Prime Minister - 6 weeks!!
Parenting Is Not Easy
My daughter was nine and I was immensely proud of the size of the book she was reading, a story about a magical school and its eclectic staff and students. We had highly encouraged our kids to read by reading to them and flooding our home with books.
Yet. When my daughter came home from her babysitter and told us her friends there could not read the Harry Potter books she loved because they promoted witchcraft, I experienced severe self-doubt.
Parenting is more an art than a science. It requires constant monitoring and adjustment. If parent aren't always trying to be better at their task they're probably going backward.
Thankfully, I remembered the great books I've read that were banned such as: Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, The Handmaid's Tale, The Grapes of Wrath, Alice in Wonderland, etc.
We continued to buy the Harry Potter books as soon as they came out to no detriment to our precious girl.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Harry Potter
is a story where good triumphs over evil which is what happens in most of the stories in the bible. Shame that those so-called bible thumpers don't get that.
Only in the USA are there 'Banned Book Societies'... the land of the free (only as long as it is my version of free and not yours)
Make the most of it people. I am sure that the current idil will not last much beyond Jan 20th 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwRfXv3I4wI
Samantha
Yet the anti-trans opinions
Yet the anti-trans opinions of its author are not banned. Not that I think they should. It's just that her comments are more harmful than a children's book.
There are magical characters all over TV and every other media.
Leeanna
Threw the whole lot away..
I used to love the naive " Mallory Towers" vibe of the Harry Potter books, especially the early ones. I wasn't such a fan of the rather dark later ones, but that was personal choice. They jarred rather, like the Famous Five taking up drug dealing...
But then the sainted JK started making nasty comments, about ME, and at that point I threw the whole lot in the recycling.
At least Emma and Daniel spoke out and that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. JK can commit what hate crimes she wants, I really don't care anymore, and I certainly don't support banning books for political or religious reasons, but, please, they aren't great works of art.
"Lately it occurs to me..
what a long strange trip its been."
they aren't great works of art.
more like the pulp fiction of the 1950s. Great entertainment but hardly great literature. IMHO, JKR has gone off the rails, much like you said.
The so-called right are ranting and raving over problems that really don't exist but to their base, they are dealing with a huge problem/epidemic.
Samantha
Trans hate is not a 'right' phenomenon
Rowling is a Labour party supporter, and spoke out against Trump. Julie Bindell, another prominent left-winger, is also well-known trans-hater. I could list others, but it's not worth the bother. Trans hate is trans hate, and not a right or left wing attribute. Unfortunately, trans hate occurs in all shades of political opinion.
Trans hate is very much a right wing phenomenon
I don't think it's quite accurate to say "trans hate is trans hate, and not a right or left wing attribute". This makes it sound like transphobia is some weird random thing completely outside of the realm of politics that just happens somehow, like catching cooties or being snatched up by pterodactyls.
I think it's more accurate to say that trans hate is a right wing AND a left wing phenomenon. Very much a product of the ideologies of certain right and left wing factions, which both seem to gaining power and respectability on their respective sides of the Atlantic. To the UK's left-wing TERFS we're seen as a threat to women, trans women being male invaders of women's spaces, and trans men acting as a reinforcement of sexist binary stereotypes of "masculine" and "feminine" that won't just let tomboys or butch lesbians be themselves but snatches them up (like pterodactyls) and convinces them that they're men. Both of these notions are of course total bullshit, attributing political motives to innate identities that have nothing to do with sexual politics.
And speaking of bullshit, over here in the US "transgenderism" is seen by social conservatives as a threat to the roles we're assigned at birth by God or maybe biology, a danger to the natural order, threatening total social chaos and the collapse of civilization if people can decide who they are for themselves instead of who the right wing authorities (and not those trans-affirming weirdos from the AMA, the APA, the mainstream press + the depraved Hollywood elite!) demands they should be.
It's weird that these otherwise oppositional movements should find common ground in bashing us. In the UK several of JK Rowling's new "gender critical" buddies (and maybe she herself) have admitted to a grudging respect for Matt Walsh's disgusting "documentary" WHAT IS A WOMAN?; saying that despite a great deal of objectionable sexist material it at least got the part right about how wrong and dangerous trans people are. Transphobia sure makes strange bedfellows...
~Ahimsa, and watch out for pterodactyls; Veronica
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
We must understand, "The Handmaid's Tale" ...
is not merely a dystopian novel.
It is a How-To Manual for totalitarians.
One 'choke point' I recall in THT is credit cards. Everyone tagged female - their credit stopped working.
How many 'choke points' are there?
Credit cards, the phone system, the internet, gas stations, ATMs ...
Shut down a few of those, and any ability to organize is gone. And for the USA 2nd Amendment people: "How do you turn the internet back on with guns?"
Shut down a few of those, and we >will< report to The Processing Center if we want food...