By now, we all must have read that a school board in Washington State has banned Harper Lee’s tale of rape and racial inequality in America’s south, To Kill a Mockingbird.
It is proof, if further proof is required that the Left has become as censorious as the Right always has been.
What we now have is a bipartisan approach to the process of banning things we don’t like. The only difference is in the determination of what is regarded as objectionable. The only certain outcome is joylessness and ignorance.
A group of high school teachers in Mukilteo School District, half an hour’s drive north of Seattle, argued the 1961 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature be removed from study because it “celebrated white saviourhood.”
The school district board handed down its decision with more than a touch of nit-pickery. To Kill a Mockingbird is not banned from school libraries, they say, but it will now no longer feature for study in the district’s schools at Year Nine level with 13- and 14-year-old students deemed too stupid to understand historical context and incapable of critical thinking.
Then they came for the Holocaust
In the same week, a school board in Tennessee banned another Pulitzer Prize winner, Maus, from being taught in the McMinn County that lies between Chattanooga and Knoxville.
The graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, chronicles how the author’s parents survived the Holocaust at Auschwitz through depictions of animals — with the Holocaust victims as mice, and Nazis as cats.
On this occasion, the book was banned because Maus depicted the Holocaust as violent.
Read the article by Jack the Insider in The Australian.