Books can harm our children but not guns! It’s people that hurt people! 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Books are just so dangerous. Way worse than guns.
/s.
I really don’t like those fuckers.
I think this books banning issue is being approached by both sides with absolutely no nuance by either side. Conservatives say these books show things they don’t want their children reading. That’s reasonable. Liberals say that banning books is bad for society because it restricts a person from being exposed to different ideas and making up their own mind. That’s true imo. Can we not just have a “restricted” label slapped on certain controversial books that require parental consent for minors to check out?
I joined the parent media committee at my son’s Metro Atlanta elementary school this year. This group makes the first decisions about what books are allowed in the library and, if necessary, goes on to argue and defend those decisions. We have our first meeting in a couple weeks and while I’m hoping there are no objections to any books, I’m ready for a fight.
If you’re a parent who supports book accessibility in schools, I encourage you to find out if your school has a similar committee you can join. We need to make sure that the reasonable voices are just as loud as those who want to ban books.
I fucking hate that you can’t award gold anymore. You are doing amazing things for the world.
Make sure you read the books
This particular one is definitely not appropriate for elementary schoolers.
And this is why elementary level libraries have different books than middle or HS libraries. Most elementary students aren’t interested in reading this either as it doesn’t relate to their life experiences, it does relate to the experiences of middle and high school students. We don’t put To Kill A Mockingbird in elementary libraries either
It’s not meant for elementary schoolers, either. It’s a YA novel. What weirdo thinks YA is aimed at 6-10 year olds?
This is it. Regulatory capture works both ways 🤘🏻
So what is there in this book ‘Flamer’ that the parents were objecting to?
You can see some of it here: https://tahomaparents.org/news/1elz8u3t0npkesqvdu48hakk64tqxc
I imagine it’s the masturbation and naked boys in the shower stuff that raised objections. Bear in mind it’s a graphic novel so there are pictures, but not explicit AFAIK.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/flamer
^ Click the parent’s guide for a decent summary.
The conclusion may be wholesome, but between lots of swearing, plenty of crude sexual discussions, and some graphic violence, this sounds fair to remove from children’s shelves.
Wait is this book not about an arsonist?
There’s always gay in the banana stand
IIRC it’s about a boy scout struggling with his sexuality/gender and he gets sexually assaulted. Rises above it. It’s a little cliche from a narrative standpoint.
If conservatives want to say it’s not appropriate for kids that’s a fair argument, but they are acting like it’s porn.
It’s also not appropriate that most teens have friends who have had those experiences but it’s the world we live in. Unfortunately, the folks enacting the book bans are in full denial of the reality their children and other children live in.
He gets bullied but not sexually assaulted.
You guys know there’s a difference between “burning books” and “not putting porn in the children’s library” right?
This sub doesn’t apparently
Flamer isn’t pornographic.
Same area that had a disclaimer that evolution was a theory in biology textbooks.
https://www.cnn.com/2002/EDUCATION/09/26/creationism.evolution/
Isn’t like, gravity a theory…?
Give the book out to as many kids as wants it.
I know people here want to grab their pitchforks and say that this is due to some anti-LGBTQ sentiment but at the end of the day, after looking into this book and a lot of its content, I’m not sure how anyone could argue that it’s acceptable for being on school shelves. It’s got some pretty crude scenes that I can understand schools not wanting to endorse.
…after looking into this book and a lot of its content, I’m not sure how anyone could argue that it’s acceptable for being on school shelves. It’s got some pretty crude scenes that I can understand schools not wanting to endorse.
Honestly? Grow up, dude. Writing about something is not the same thing as endorsing it, and making a book with crude—which is a highly relative term, by the way—content available to students does not mean endorsement of that content either.
If we were to do away with any and all icky or crude books containing containing that we think teenagers are too immature to understand or evaluate, we would be excluding a wide swath of classic and highly regarded literature. Maya Angelou is out, surely—sexual assault on a young girl is very crude and not something any teenager has experienced before. Nightwood and The Color Purple should be thrown out for depicting lesbianism, which some parents would not want their teenage children to know about, much less be influenced by. What about violence? Drug use? Foul language? All subjects that could be construed as crude, and yet many books you’ll already find at a school library are full of them.
If you’re so concerned about what your child is reading, then talk to them about it.
People above 12 years are capable enough to think for themselves what they want to read or not. Adults shouldn’t interfere by taking these books out of the library.
When I was in high school I read Lord of the Flies, where a group of children murder another child.
That was fine, but this isn’t?
Amusingly the entire Atlanta Journal-Constitution website is inaccessible in the EU for spurious GDPR reasons. The true reason is presumably the embarrassment of such book-banning events happening in a supposedly civilised modern society. Are you guys still burning witches too?
Do schools in Europe not have selection criteria that exclude which books can be in schools? This book isn’t banned, just being removed from a schools library
Witches in America were hanged or crushed. They were burned in Europe, mostly in Catholic countries.
Are you guys still burning witches too?
Next week. If the “moral majority” gets their way.
People get so upset about high schoolers reading stories that contain realistic high schoolers.
Nothing happens in that book that these kids haven’t seen
Most kids have seen porn by the age of 12, that doesn’t mean we just say screw it, here’s a full length film, go wild.
Absolutely. That is one of the points that always drives me nuts. Like these parents don’t know their own children. They don’t want to know or see them in a realistic sense.
Nothing happens in that book that these kids haven’t seen
I never got a bunch of my friends together to jerk each other off into a cup in order to drink it.
This is a graphic novel too. What’s the call on drawings of naked boys masturbating?
It’s neither depicted nor presented, it’s something that happens off-camera and is only mentioned/described. And the hs baseball team my junior year got in trouble for doing essentially the same thing as a hazing ritual.
Not every high schooler is a porn addicted coomer into drugs, ya know.
We wouldn’t want teens in Georgia to read a realistic and empathetic portrayal of what it’s like to be a kid who is bullied for being gay, now would we?
It’s more fetish than realistic. It doesn’t need to be in a school library.
A friend of mine is president of a friend of the libraries. She gets copies of the Library’s Board of Trustees meeting notes, which includes forms that people have filled out and shared it with me. There were many saying that the book “George” should be banned. Apparently it’s about a trans kid. It sure struck me as a targeted campaign. The hilarious thing is that many of the complaints pretty much said parents should decide what kids should read. So yeah, do your job as a fucking parent and read the stuff your kids read before they do, asshole. A couple said their kid checked the book out. Yeah, not likely. Too bad so many “christians” are such fucking liars.
I’d shop at a thrift shop owned by a small church. They’d have a regular customer come in (male), he’d try on a bunch of women’s clothes and not put it away. It made the very conservative guy at the counter angry. Oddly only because he didn’t put the clothes away, seemed to be blocking out the women’s clothes part mentally. 😂. There were a few women who worked at the church, they ran a planned parenthood knockoff. Always had a few pregnant girls around. They’d talk about telling the girls whatever they wanted to hear to, “save the baby”. Completely wrong behavior in my opinion. Women should have access to accurate information. They could care less about that though. Lie through their teeth, and probably kick them to the curb once the baby was born. lol. I’d go inside there and take anything of value, for as cheap as possible.
One of the subjects present in Mike Curato’s debut graphic novel is the toxic masculinity and homophobia that Navarro contends with, which happens during his time at the Catholic school and while at the summer camp. This is also portrayed when Aiden attempts to fit in with his pubescent campmates by acting heterosexually and imitating their “homophobic, macho behaviour”. (source: wikipedia)
Well we can’t allow boys to learn that toxic masculinity is bad! /s
If you want a book to pass a board test like that you either have to manipulate the board into thinking that way, or you need to pick a book that doesn’t make an enemy out of anyone.
Any book that portrays one side as bad and the other side of normal or vice versa will always be in contention as a no.
Whether you agree or not, it’s just the fact of the matter. You need books to squeeze your way in one step at a time instead of going straight to the fire. The real world doesn’t work off the reddit circle jerk, it works slowly. Or just wait 50 years when no one who’s old enough really gives a shit anymore. That’s pretty much our best bet. I can’t imagine anyone doing any of this 50 years from now.
Idk, painting normal boys as toxic isn’t great. I don’t really get why people defend these types of books in schools, just let people buy it online if they want to. It’s not banned from the state