Where's Your Dr. Seuss, Now?

 

Texas school district pulls 400 books from libraries after state GOP lawmaker's inquiry https://t.co/YFZ3PoP9VI pic.twitter.com/gn68pUEnTi

— The Hill (@thehill) December 7, 2021

Before I freak entirely out:

Many of the books on Krause's list center around abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education, LGBTQ narratives, the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism. Some of the popular titles on the list are "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron, "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, and "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" and "Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

"Most of those are appropriate and will stay on our library shelves as is, however, some may contain content that needs further review to ensure the books are accessible based on age appropriateness," Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications for the school district, said in a statement obtained by NBC. "For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children."

Look, I feel like it's thought-policing the kiddos to limit their choices based on what adults think is age-appropriate because I can not begin to tell you what my hyperlexic reading list was about when I was like, 10 or 11, and my dad gave me a dollar to not read Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women when I already had reread it a few times. (This logically drew me to want to read D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other verboten authors--and I still don't know exactly what made my dad find that one fraught because it isn't exactly a well-known title and I don't know if he skimmed it and went "whoa!" or what. My baby brain never saw the "Whoa!" bit.) 

Yeah, it's probably unfortunate that my teenage reading of Heinlein contained outright pedophilia. (That was pretty screwed up.) I stand on the side of talking with kids about the books they read, but not actually telling them not to. Kids aren't Silly Putty-impressionable. They can think. They need to be able to question and grow.

But I understand that administratively, it might be an idea to pacify helicopter parents to not exactly reject kids accessing these books, but giving them some kind of PG, PG-13, R, kind of code. Or maybe giving parents the ability to veto checking out certain books the way religious parents could veto their kids getting sex ed in school, because of course your kid having less information is going to be greeeeeaaaaaatttttt for them. 

Anyway, bitching about censorship of nursery lit and then saying "No wait, there's a whole list of shit we don't want kids reading about" is so entirely GOP double standard I feel like this is their brand--fake rebellious, but actually still gatekeeping as all hell. 

And speaking of gatekeeping, the Anti-CRT bullshit? Just put CRT curriculum in the Twitter search bar and you will find people who are certain it's everywhere. And they are mad about it. Even if it for them seems to mean Black History being taught outside of February. They are so mad. 

And they want this education cancelled, right? Real facts, just straight history--but so sad for the snowflake babies, yes? The cancel culture is the right wing. They want to promote any least criticism on the left  as cancel culture, but then actually promote bans of real scholarship that rejects or refutes their assumptions. 

Go back to Dr. Seuss, Republicans. You are not apparently grown enough to handle the adult curriculum of living in the 21st century.