World News Korner

Six wonderful books banned by Christian influenced school boards and the reasons why.

Here is the list courtesy of Mad Mikes America:

1. The Invisible Man.

Reason: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a masterpiece that captures the grim realities of racial discrimination in 20th-century America. Unfortunately, thanks to a ban passed by the local board of education, school kids in Randolph County, N.C, won’t be able find that novel in their library. An angry parent objected to the book’s sexual content and lack of innocence, and the school board agreed to ban the book by a vote of 5-2 with one of the board members, Gary Mason, a scholarly man no doubt, stated: “I didn’t find any literary value.”

Such a great book! I read it when I was young and have recommended to to kids for years. Morons!


2. The entire Tarzan series.

Reason: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic series about a man living in the jungle was pulled from the shelves of a public library in the appropriately named town of Tarzana, Calif. Authorities thought the adventure stories unsuitable for youngsters, since there was no evidence that Tarzan and Jane had married before they started cohabiting in the treetops. Ralph Rothmund, who ran Burroughs’ estate, protested that the couple had taken marital vows in the jungle with Jane’s father serving as minister. “The father may not have been an ordained minister,” said Rothmund, “but after all things were primitive in those days in the jungle.”

Yes we can't have children emulating this kind of behavior by running off to the wilds of Africa, meeting a young woman, and cohabiting in the treetops with her, now can we?

By the way the Tarzan books were my favorites as a kid and I read all of them, and watched every one of the movies, religiously.

I could even do a rather impressive impression of the Tarzan yell. Used the scare the crap out of the neighborhood dogs. (Well it was either the yell or the fact I was standing in my backyard in my underwear with a butter knife slipped into the waistband. True story.)


3. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Reason: The book has been challenged numerous times for sexually explicit passages, and, in 1983, the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for rejecting the book because it was “a real downer.”

Yes what a downer. I mean it certainly had no redeeming value as a lesson on prejudice, or adolescence, or human suffering, or anything like that right?

To be serious it is a book that EVERYBODY should read once in their life. Or perhaps more than once


4. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Reason: School authorities in Merrimack, N.H. found nothing amusing about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which a girl washes ashore after a shipwreck, disguises herself as a page, and falls in love with her male master. That jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance was deemed in violation of the district’s “prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction,” and copies of the play were pulled from schools

Cross-dressing, and faux gay sex stuff must be stopped don'tcha know.

After all nothing says you are receiving a well rounded education quite like raging homophobia, and a fear of literary classic, right?


5. Charlotte’s Web

Reason: A parents group in Kansas decided that any book featuring two talking animals must be the work of the devil, and so had E.B. White’s 1952 work barred from classrooms. The group’s central complaint was that humans are the highest level of God’s creation, as shown by, they said, the fact we’re “the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.”

WTF? Charlotte's Web? And since when are animals talking "sacrilegious and disrespectful to God?"

Haven't these idiots ever watched a Disney film?

Scratch that, they probably haven't stepped foot in the "Devil's Cinema" in years.

6. The Harry Potter series

Reason: While pretty much every child was devouring the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007, one school was pulling all seven Potter books from its library shelves. The pastor of St. Joseph School in Wakefield, Mass., deemed their sorcery-heavy story-lines inappropriate for a Catholic school. Parents said the pastor thought most children were “strong enough to resist the temptation,” but his job was to “protect the weak and the strong.”

Yeah well this one was a gimme wasn't it? After all Christians have been freaking out about this series since the very first one hit the bookstores. And do you remember that trio of young exorcists who were going to England to battle the forces of Harry Potter?

Of course these are wonderful books as well, and they have been worth their weight in gold considering how they encouraged so many youngsters to step away from their televisions and start reading again.

So those are the books that certain religious types want to keep out of the hands of students.

And yet the book that these people would endorse without question, and would insist that EVERY student read from cover to cover, is the Bible.

You remember the Bible right? It is the book that has great moral stories like this one:

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Yeah but of course it doesn't contain any sorcery, talking animals, or sex right?

Wait....

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