Secret police? Sure, why not! Book banning? Sure, why not!
It all started with Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County mother who said she was horrified to discover that one of her sons, a high school senior, was assigned to read the 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved.”
The seminal work of fiction about a former slave after the Civil War by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison contains scenes of bestiality, gang rape and an infant’s gruesome murder, according Murphy, who said it could be inappropriate for young readers. She ticked off other critically acclaimed works in the same category: “The Bluest Eye,” also by Morrison, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.
Under the bill, K-12 teachers would be required to “directly identify the specific instructional material and sexually explicit content contained in such material.” Parents could “opt out” their children from reading material the parents found objectionable, and the teacher would have to find the student something else to read.
The idiocy of this is hard to overstate. I mean, are these right wingers going to demand that the Bible – which contains all kinds of “begetting” and “smiting,” among other things – be banned? Of course not; that would be utterly assinine. Also, as a progressive leader in Virginia points out, this “*headdesk* moment” by Delegate Steve Landes (the sponsor of this bill) could effectively end up banning “Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison’s novels (seminal works of American and African-American literature) from classrooms.” The dumbing down of America into an “Idiocracy” continues, apparently (for more on that subject, see Here are six things Trump did in the last month that prove ‘Idiocracy’ is already here).
By the way, this reminds me of 2006, when George Allen attacked Jim Webb’s critically-acclaimed writings because they contained things Allen apparently found offensive (more likely, he was just feigning outrage) . I guess what I’m most confused about is how any Democrats could vote for this crap, as a bunch of them did in the House and as one (Lynwood Lewis) did in the Senate. Seriously guys???
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