Kyle City Limits
by BRENDA STEWART
I guess my affinity for Banned Book Week (the last week each September) can be traced directly back to a little penguin named Tango. After hanging out in libraries and book stores my entire life, I had always been intrigued with the ludicrousness of censorship, but it had never been brought home like it was in a local library five years ago.
Seems this hot new arrival entitled “And Tango Makes Three” was being rejected by the librarian because its content was being challenged in libraries nationwide and apparently it was just easier to omit it altogether than to deal with the controversy. My curiosity piqued, I asked if I could take the book home with me.
What I encountered was one of the coolest books I’ve ever read. It was an uncomplicated chronology of a couple of male penguins in the Central Park Zoo partnered in hatching an egg, Tango, and raising it. A story written in simple prose about family and unconditional nurturing and natural instinct. It read like a fairy tale but it was actually documented truth spanning six years. Yet because of its positive portrayal of a same sex relationship, this National Book Award winner has earned the dubious honor of being “the most challenged book” of 2006, 2007 and 2008 and, last year, it was the most banned book in the nation. The truth be damned.
It’s in good company though. Just skimming the lists I found “Catcher in the Rye”, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Shel Silverstein have several different classics that hit the list on a frequent basis. Twain, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Steig. It makes my head swim.
Even the mighty Webster’s Dictionary has been kicked out of school libraries for “graphic”, although anatomically correct, entries defining various parts of the human body. They are also endeavoring to save us from common words, now designated pornographic slang, such as bed and knocker.
The real stomach burner for me? In 2009 there were 410 book challenges reported to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Of those, more than half of the challenges came from only two states: Texas and Pennsylvania. Cringe.
And then I remembered the nationally painful ridicule last winter when a Texas State Board of Education member made a motion to ban Bill Martin’s classic “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” from our public schools because they had neglected to do a basic fact check. Thirty-four days and counting until we finally get some sanity back on that board. It can’t happen too soon.
But, evidently, we’re not just fighting Bible-thumping zealots. Seems our ifriends at Apple have a “naughty words filter” and it recently decided that the word “sperm”, as in “Moby Dick was a sperm whale”, was sexually graphic. So the iBookstore decided to use “s***m whale” to shield us from the horror. Ironically, Moby’s last name, somehow, was left unscathed.
