Reading Time: 5 minutes Many classic books, including Roald Dahl’s, teach morals that are repugnant by today’s standards. Can we keep the good parts without dragging along the bad, or does respect for authorial integrity force us to keep them exactly as they are?
censorship
Posted inSocial Media
Musk’s free speech claim on Twitter backfires within a week
Reading Time: 3 minutes In April, the richest person in the world made an outrageous offer to buy a popular and complex social media site. What appeared at first to be a disgruntled billionaire throwing a tantrum because he couldn’t tweet what he wanted has somehow snowballed into Elon Musk actually owning Twitter. The self-described “free speech absolutist” believes […]
Posted inFree Expression
Libraries are dangerous in the best possible way
Reading Time: 6 minutes Libraries serve the lofty purpose of making knowledge free and available to everyone, without fear or favor. That’s why they’ve come under attack from wannabe censors and book burners.
Posted inFree Expression
Banned Books Week: Fighting censorship and preserving free speech
Reading Time: 3 minutes With the number of book bans increasing at a rapid pace and becoming evermore divisive, the attention to Banned Books Week, which runs September 18-24, 2022, is more important than ever. The American Library Association’ (ALA)’s officials reported 729 challenges in 2021, making it the highest number of challenges tracked since the ALA Office of […]
Posted inBooks
A Texas school district just banned the Bible. Oops.
Reading Time: 2 minutes It finally happened. The Keller Independent School District in Texas banned the Bible in school… at least temporarily. And we have conservative Christians to thank for it. Keller ISD, in Tarrant County, has seen a flurry of activity around book bans recently. Since last October, conservative parents have demanded that certain books be censored and […]
Posted inEducation
Public libraries face new attacks from conservative Christians
Reading Time: 4 minutes A few stories about conservative Christians coming after public libraries: Voters in Jamestown Township, Michigan chose to defund the library, depriving it of 84% of its 2023 budget. Unless that decision is reversed, the Patmos Library will be forced to shut down sometime next year. The reason the vote failed? Because conservative Christians in the […]
Posted inSex & Gender
Female pastor’s pro-LGBTQ views censored in book about female pastors
Reading Time: 5 minutes The suggestion that female pastors might be accepting of LGBTQ people has created an absurd controversy in a small Christian sect after a passage from a new book was censored. It involved a book published last month called On Holy Ground: Stories By and About Women in Ministry Leadership in the Mennonite Brethren Church. The […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
A school board candidate checked out LGBTQ library books so kids can’t read them
Reading Time: 3 minutes Heather Fletcher, a candidate for the Frederick County Board of Education in Maryland, decided to grab the LGBTQ-themed books in a Pride Month display at the Brunswick Public Library so that children wouldn’t be able to check them out. She also grabbed a cup full of pins with different pronouns that people could use to […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Is de-platforming a form of censorship?
Reading Time: 6 minutes On March 30, scholar Dr. Robert Price was interviewed on YouTube and the discussion ended up being pretty controversial for some, not so much for others. What ensued was a small storm in one corner of the internet. Dr. Price was, in one case, de-platformed as a result. Many shouted accusations of censorship, confusing that […]
Posted inEducation
Banned book lists serve only one purpose: to entrench prejudice and bigotry
Reading Time: 7 minutes Last year Texas lawmaker, Matt Krause got himself noticed by creating a list of 850 books he deemed unsuitable for young readers. The Krause list of “unsuitable material”—including Class Act (2020) by award-winning writer and illustrator Jerry Craft—was distributed to a large number of schools libraries in the state. As a consequence, one school district […]