"The Escalating War on Reading"

[minoanmiss]

US sociopolitics.

https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/the-escalating-war-on-reading (with thanks to Dine)

Because I hold grudges, when I read about the current war on books in the US I think of the fights I had in the 90s and 2000s with "Freeze Peach" types whose idea of free speech was being able to call people slurs without being called assholes in turn. You know, I have seen not a single essay from someone of that cohort, even to inaccurately blame resistance to slurs for censorship of books? Of course they don't care about actual practical restrictions on learning. I want to email my younger self and tell her in this case she was right.

But that's me.

ANyway I found this group, "Stop Moms For Liberty", and will have to see if I think they can be effective in their mandate. https://www.stopmomsforliberty.com/

Comments

[amaebi]

They are a depressing bunch doing depressing things, and I can only hope that it will bite them in their rancid butts, and do my bit to make it so.

Also, the current howling for parents to have complete and unmonitored rights over their children: Dudes, there was plenty of scope for parental abuse of children before this.

[jadelennox]

On the one hand I am always grateful to Charlie Sykes and the Bulwark for at least trying, and on the other hand I always want to shake them and shout "this is who the right has always been! When you supported Evan McMullin instead of Hillary Clinton, this is what you were enabling! There has never been a time in the American right in my lifetime where some form of book banning wasn't something they favored!"

[sovay]

There has never been a time in the American right in my lifetime where some form of book banning wasn't something they favored!

+1.

[minoanmiss]

I think they'd deserve that letter to the editor, but you wouldn't deserve the blowback.

[hitchhiker]

i still find it amazing how people have managed to turn "mom" into a synonym for "bigot"

[minoanmiss]

It is truly horrible. Nurturing a set of people is not supposed to mean suppressing a much wider group. Feh.

[amaebi]

Speaking from personal-experience-sharpened bitter observation, "mom" is the only podium from which someone identified as "woman" can be sort of sometimes heard. So there are myriads moms groups, good and evil and kind of pointless.

[hitchhiker]

good if sad point :(

[sabotabby]

I just wish we could put them in rooms and force their eyes open, Clockwork Orange style, and make them watch/listen to the things they were saying 5 years ago.

[acelightning73]

The purpose of all this book-banning is to make sure that small children cannot be exposed to concepts which their parents would be too embarrassed to explain, mostly stuff having to do with sex. Children aren't allowed to know anything about sex until they approach puberty.

I suspect that the real motivation for all this censorship really is to avoid embarrassing the grownups. During the Clinton administration, the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was all over the news. One of my husband's co-workers complained that he didn't know how to answer when his six-year-old daughter heard a headline and asked, "Daddy, what does 'oral sex' mean? They keep saying that this girl had 'oral sex' with the President."

For that matter, why is it harmful to small children if a man puts on a sequined gown and high-heeled shoes to read them "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish"? But not if the man puts on a Superman costume?

[lemonsharks]

Good lord, you wouldn't think it would be so difficult to explain oral sex to a six year old as something like, "It means she licked his penis, which is something that no one should ever try to make you do."

Except that I doubt your husband's coworker had even gotten as far as "these are the bathing suit area parts, here us what they're called, and here's what they do (when you're kids/when you're grownups)"

[acelightning73]

Apparently this guy was just embarrassed to discuss sexual details with his daughter. (He probably expected his wife to explain stuff to their daughter.)

American society seems to have the idea that children aren't supposed to know that sex exists until they reach the "age of majority". If a girl has sex with a man on the night before her 18th birthday, she makes the man legally a child molester. If she waits until the day after her birthday, she's just an adult woman exercising free choice. But even children before puberty want to know how their bodies work, and what's that for, and why aren't we supposed to touch it or talk about it or let anybody see it? So discussing sexual details with a minor child is embarrassing, and may get the adult accused of a crime?

I wish my Puritan ancestors hadn't contributed their anti-fleshly prejudice to American culture so strongly.

[lemonsharks]

I was in the shower thinking about one (several) of my high school english teachers, who insisted we read the slurs in the books we studied aloud. And how I wish I had had the words at the time to tell them, You do not have the standing to grant us (white kids, for simplicity) that privilege. You don't even have the standing to send home a permission slip or notice about this language in the works we're studying.

And that not one of them had a discussion about Why We Feel Uncomfortable Saying Slurs Aloud (In Front Of The People Those Slurs Are About).

[minoanmiss]

I continue to be shocked that my 11th Grade Lit teacher got this one right, considering my school. When we read Huck Finn he gave us an introduction and an effective trigger warning, years before people used the term. It helped a LOT (especially in that fucking racist school). I hope every teacher who decided to just Ignore The Slurs had nightmares about it. Many many nightmares.