"D Murphy" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in
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"D Murphy" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in
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"pyotr filipivich" wrote in message
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Its a wonder that the lefties haven't attempted to ban the Harry
Potter books, chock full as they are with mysticism and
supernaturalism. Not to mention the rampant Christian symbolism,
the definitive expectation of the difference between Good and Evil,
and that you ought to not merely find Evil distasteful, but
something worth combating, actively combating, not just passing
resolutions against.

You're a little slow on the draw there, pyotr. Christian
conservatives have sued or petitioned school boards all over the
country to ban them from schools.

Lest you forget Ed there have been plenty of politically correct left
wingers pushing to ban books like "Of Mice and Men", "Adventures of
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn", and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for
offensive words, ideas, and pedaling a "softer view of slavery" among
other reasons.

_Of Mice and Men_ contains vulgarity and profanity and has been excluded
from school libraries in a few places by religious conservatives for that
reason. There was a controversy about the book on those terms in Lynchburg,
VA schools, for example (Jerry Falwell's old hangout), but they decided to
leave the book in the schools.

_Tom Sawyer..._ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ both contain the n-word, which has,
indeed, caused them to be pulled from a few school shelves. Not from our
schools, though. I wasn't aware that religious conservatives found the word
acceptable. They do seem to have a problem with _Where's Waldo_ because it
depicts a woman's breast. g


Pfffhht. You're talking about a short-term thing that was out on the
fringes. Christian conservatives have been trying to ban books for 200
years.

Try finding those books in a middle school library then. They went from
required reading to banned.

Really? Do you have this on good authority? I know that my son was assigned
_Of Mice and Men_, but I don't remember when. It might have been his
freshman year of high school.

Those books have all been challenged in many schools, but so has damned near
everything else of any value. Someone can be found to challenge school books
of almost any type. Overall, I think you'll find that the consistent and
insistent objections have come from the right, especially from religious
conservatives, who find so much of contemporary culture objectionable. But a
challenge doesn't often result in a book being pulled.

As for the length of time they've been at;
that's really not the problem is it?

Well, if the wave of objections from the left didn't last (and I don't think
it did; it seemed to reach a high point a decade or more ago, when PC was in
full flower), while the objections from the right have been steady and
unrelenting, then, yes, I think that is part of the problem.



I also find it hypocritical that Cliff is against burning books. Him
being a big proponent of freedom and all. It's merely another legal
form of freedom of speech AFAICT. Just so long as the book you're
burning legally belongs to you.

Cliff is against someone burning his own books? Why?

During you hiatus he was in a tizzy over some folks burning Harry Potter
books. I actually read his link. Turns out they bought them, then lit
them on fire. As best as I recall, I got him to say that flag burning is
OK but not book burning. Seems like the same thing to me.

In principle, I'd agree. If someone wants to burn their own books for some
symbolic reason, they're probably fools, but that's their prerogative.


Neither the far left or the far right has much tolerance for freedom
of speech.

Ideologues are a plague upon civilization.


Maybe. But they really do test where the lines are drawn and they cause
people to think. So it's not all bad. You just can't let them run amok.

Right. They're OK to define the endpoints of an issue. That's the extent of
their usefulness.

--
Ed Huntress