BOOKBANCEPTION! Florida School District Bans Book About Book Banning
The title is 'Ban This Book,' so they did. Just like their hippie parents stole 'Steal This Book.'
As if on a mission to prove that the book-bannin’ fever in Florida is still going strong, the school board in Indian River County, Florida, voted late last month to ban a book about book banning, even though the district’s own review committee, made up of educators and parents in the community, had voted to keep the book in elementary and middle school libraries.
The offending item, with the dangerously imperative title Ban This Book, by Alan Gratz, is a 2018 middle-grades novel about a bookish fourth-grader named Amy Anne who’s astonished to find that her “favorite book in the whole world,” the very real and occasionally censored From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, has been pulled from her school library after a parent challenged it. She and her friends fight the powers that be, starting a secret lending library of banned books in their lockers, and protest censorship by making up crazy reasons to ban every single book in the library. Spoiler: We bet it has a happy ending. We’ll find out soon enough, since we just bought it with this handy Wonkette-gets-a-small commission link.
Sounds like a terrific book to us! So tell us, Tallahassee Democrat (that’s a paper, not just some Democrat standing there), why did the school board overrule its review committee and ban the nice book about standing up for freedom and American values?
School Board members said they disliked how it referenced other books that had been removed from schools and accused it of "teaching rebellion of school board authority," as described in the formal motion to oust it.
Well, then. Guess Mark Twain was right when he said, in Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”
And hey, here’s a big surprise: The challenge to Ban this Book was initially brought by one Jennifer Pippin, the president of the area chapter of Moms for Liberty. The board voted three to two to remove the book; two of the members voting to pull it were supported by the Mad Moms in their election campaigns, and the third, Kevin McDonald (definitely not the Kids in the Hall alum), was appointed to the board by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year to replace another member, Brian Barefoot, who resigned in February because he was moving out of the district.
That appointment probably doomed the nice little freedom girl novel, because
Barefoot had been on DeSantis’ hit list of school board members statewide the governor wanted to target in the 2024 election, saying they don't protect parental rights or shield students from "woke" ideologies.
Yup, sounds like the sort of diabolical radical who thinks kids should read books. Probably wears Birkenstocks, too.
McDonald explained at the May 20 board meeting why he was voting to remove the book: It doesn’t teach kids to respect authoriteh, and that causes unrest:
"The title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them."
We suppose that means the book was filthy by proxy, then. Pippin’s challenge accused Ban This Book of containing “sexual conduct,” although at the board meeting, Teri Barenburg, chair of the Indian River County School Board, said it contains nothing of the sort:
"It does not depict or describe sexual conduct, period. Maybe it refers to other books that do but it does not do that itself. […] It's a cute little book about a little girl that's trying to defy establishment. Does she go about it in the right way? No. Does she learn her lesson? Yes."
Well there you go: Even the book’s radical leftist satanic groomer defenders admit that it teaches children to defy authoriteh, the first step toward majoring in English Literature, Women’s Studies, or Anarchist Bombmaking.
McDonald was particularly incensed that the novel shows Amy Anne breaking rules in her fight against her school board, like stocking her clandestine terrorist library with books that had been taken off the school’s shelves and stored in the librarian’s office.
McDonald accused the author of justifying such behavior because it was levied against the school board she disagrees with: "That lesson alone is at the heart of corruption in our society," he said.
How true this is! Amy Anne is clearly a criminal with no respect for rules, like a common gangster or Republican Presidential nominee. The Tallahassee Democrat explains that McDonald was (spoiler alert!)
referring to a scene on the last page, where the main character is ironically reflecting on how the books were removed with fears they would "encourage kids to lie, steal, and be disrespectful to adults." Instead, she thought, it was the book banning that prompted such behavior, which she had been punished for.
Wow, that is incendiary. It suggests that adults can sometimes be wrong even if they think they’re acting in kids’ best interests, and that’s simply not something that children can be allowed to think.
Gratz, the author, exposed his own beliefs as a radical terrorist anti-American woke bad critical race theory DEI woke wokeness, telling the Democrat (paper not person) such criticism was taking plot elements out of context “deliberately just to get a book off the shelf.”
"Clearly, that's not the message of the book," Gratz said. "But they were making 'good trouble,' as John Lewis would say, and these kids know the difference between good trouble and bad trouble."
See? He admits he admires a radical lawbreaker/maker (and comic books nerd!) who broke laws simply because he thought they were “unjust,” and helped change America forever, which really is why all the Moms are so Mad even today. That’s absolutely what McDonald meant by the “heart of corruption in our society,” in case you didn’t catch it.
Another board member who voted to ban the book, Gene Posca, explained that it had to be kept from children because “This book is really just a liberal Marxist propaganda piece," and we can certainly all agree that the Bolsheviks came to power by reading books about a sweet little kid who enjoyed reading.
Gratz, speaking before he could be locked away to protect Florida children, argued that on the contrary, the book is somehow about democracy, even though America is a REPUBLIC, god damn it. He said that the real turning point of the novel comes when the painfully shy Amy Anne gathers the courage to speak during public comments at a school board meeting, convincing the members to return all the books to the library, yay!
"It doesn't teach rebellion against the school board; it teaches civic engagement," Gratz said. "If that means opposing what your school board is doing, that means opposing what your school board is doing."
See, there he is again trashing authority. Doesn’t he understand that real education is about learning your place and doing what you’re told?
This is only the latest victory for Mad Moms chair Pippin, who has filed 120 challenges to books in the district, resulting in the banning of dangerous Marxist porn books including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and that horrible nasty porn book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, which faithfully includes passages Anne Frank actually wrote about nekkid lady statues and wanting to kiss another girl, how horrible.
Gratz, ever the dangerous radical, contended that the goal here isn’t to protect children at all, but to make ideas the school board majority doesn’t like just go away forever.
"They don't want these books to exist," he said. Especially, he added, books by and about communities of color and the LGBTQ community. "Now they don't want my book on the shelf because it would tell kids that these books exist: The books they can't even get in the library."
Just crazy how he keeps admitting what he’s up to, with all that sneaky freedom and liberty and backtalk to authoriteh that’s ruining America.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Tallahassee Democrat / Florida Freedom to Read Project on Twitter]
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When I first heard of this a couple days ago, I immediately checked out Ban This Book from the library. I did not start reading it until last night. it's a fast read, but I'm only halfway through. It's good so far -- for adults it might seem a little bit too simple and thus too blunt, but it's not really written for us. one of the things I find particularly interesting is that about 1/3rd of the way in to the book the main character Amy Anne Ollinger has had her favourite book banned, and so she got her own copy, which suddenly became more interesting to her friends who wanted to know just what juicy goodness must be inside for adults to want to ban it. So she starts lending her copy around, then borrowing books from other people so she can read all the banned books. Then she starts collecting copies of all the banned books so she can lend them to other kids herself.
Here's the freaky part: she needs a way to tell kids what books she has available to lend, so she lists all the banned books and tapes the list up on her locker. It's just a list of banned books, that's all. Remember this:
>> And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them. <<
This is the reason that the real life school board is using to justify banning Ban This Book, but in the book itself the principal calls Amy Anne down to her office to order her to take down the list b/c it's wrong to let kids know which books are banned. Amy Anne has a hard time speaking up about anything to anyone (a main point in the book and a major part of her character), but she manages to ask her principal what's wrong with telling the truth. The books were banned, she's saying the same thing that the school board said, so why is it wrong when she says it?
That scene leapt to the front of my mind as positively prophetic when I read this real-life school-schmuck's rationalization for banning Ban This Book and the endearing (though fictional) Amy Anne.
They'll be having active reader drills in Florida schools by September.