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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFar-Right Group Wants to Ban Kids From Reading Books on Male Seahorses, Galileo, and MLK
School books about Martin Luther King Jr. are too divisive, claims a conservative group at the center of a Tennessee book ban battle. A story about the astronomer Galileo Galilei is anti-church. A picture book about seahorses is too sexy.
As the school year resumes, simmering fights over school books have returned to a boil. In some schools, like in Pennsylvanias Central York School District this week, students have beaten back bans on books about racism. But elsewhere, like in Tennessees Williamson County School District, the battle is ongoing, bolstered by new state laws that ban the teaching of certain race-related topics. At the heart of that fight is a conservative group, led by a private-school parent, that has a sprawling list of complaints against common classroom books. Many of the books are about race, but other targets include dragons, sad little owls, and hurricanes.
Registering its website in late 2020, the group Moms For Liberty is one of a series of conservative education groups to spring up in the wake of 2020s racial justice protests. The group is currently involved in battles against in-school mask mandates, as well as a particularly heated fight over school books in Tennessees Williamson County.
In June, the groups leader, who does not have children in the district, authored a letter to the Tennessee Department of Education, complaining that the districts curriculum violated a new state law against the teaching of some race-related subjects in public schools. (That law, one of multiple enacted over the past year on state and local levels, faced strong criticism, with opponents warning that it would impede teaching about racism in American history.) The MFL letter specifically took issue with curriculum items about Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, protests during the Civil Rights Movement, and school segregation.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/far-right-group-wants-to-ban-kids-from-reading-books-on-male-seahorses-galileo-and-martin-luther-king-jr?ref=home
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I wish people would mind their own goddam business!
Firestorm49
(4,002 posts)Ocelot II
(115,267 posts)They don't want kids to know that Galileo was accused of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life by the Inquisition for having the temerity to point out the truth, that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the opposite, which was church doctrine at the time. WTF? Back to the seventeenth century, kids.
Eppur se muove.
Sympthsical
(8,925 posts)Is that he basically worked around it with, "Hey man, it's just a theory!" and that he was merely playing Devil's advocate (in this case, literally).
But hey, no burning. Kinda worked out.
underpants
(182,271 posts)Aristus
(66,075 posts)I'm still stuck on they find seahorses sexy...
Lot to unpack there...
Hekate
(90,189 posts)When seahorses mate, the female inserts her ovipositor into the male's brood pouch (an external structure that grows on the body of the male) and deposits her unfertilized eggs into the pouch. The male then releases sperm into the pouch to fertilize the eggs.
Seems about right to me. And so very arousing.
rickyhall
(4,889 posts)Hekate
(90,189 posts)
in the first place. Those are some disgusting humans, if you ask me.
Deuxcents
(15,776 posts)Baby sit the fertilized eggs until they get out on their own. Sharing parenting responsibilities is a bad thing to teach? This banning of books n movies n complaining about what they like n dont like has gone too far. Change the channel. Dont read the book. Do they just think choice is for taking the vaccines?
Hekate
(90,189 posts)The world is full of idiots.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)I'm currently reading Mario Livio's book "Galileo and the Science Deniers" (2020) and Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover" (2008). The bullshit just never stops.