A Follow Up Story on The Devil’s Storybookand The Devil: Great Mysteries, Opposing Viewpoints, were checked out from the Chestnut Ridge Middle School library by David O’Quinn, 14,an eighth-grader, this past fall.
A local businessman is organizing a candlelight prayer vigil to rally support for a group that wants restrictions placed on occult-related books in township school libraries.
“It’s not a protest,” said Martino Cartier, 28, who is planning the event for Sunday at Washington Lake Park. Cartier ownsMartino’s Salon XI, a local beauty salon.
The group is not asking for an outright ban, but wants the school district to create a policy requiring younger students to get their parents’ permission before checking out books with occult references, said Tahir Mella, O’Quinn’s stepfather.
Via Gary “Hairy” Price
now that’s interesting…
A little restraint by the book-banners.
We typically don’t grant kids the rights of adults (although we hold them accountable to adult rules whenever they get to be 13-16), so this is semi-acceptable.
But I’d much prefer anyone to be able to read anything they can understand.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
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slip slidey
I dunno, Duke. Just what *is occult? Technically, to us non-Christians (or non-subscribers to any faith-based mythology), stories of a guy who can part a sea and make a banquet out of a few loaves of bread and a basket of fish is pretty supernatural and occultish. If you’re going to require parental permission, I’d think you’d have to make it across-the-board, and not pick and choose topics. Because, you know, a good library has something to offend everyone.
As a related aside, with the implementation of CIPA, we’re having to come up with special cards for the 12-16 y.o. set that will need to be signed by parents before they can get computer access (filtered tho’ it will be). Before now, anyone 12 and over could get their own card, without a parental signature. With these new cards, a parent sign-off will confer blanket permission for access to any library resources. I shudder to think of the level of bureacracy created by having special sign-offs for particular topics. Not to mention the mess of who decides what titles go in any particular problematic topic.
Yow!
Re:slip slidey
Truer words was never spoke. One person’s “occult” is another person’s “unassailable doctrine,” and vice-versa. There is no way this can be a judgment call for library staff.
And if The Devil’s Storybook they are talking about here is the Natalie Babbitt children’s fiction item I recall from my own childhood, then okay: I am officially laughing my *ss off at these bozos.
Re:slip slidey
Eve Merriam’s Halloween ABC, an alphabet primer. Madeleine L’Engle’s series of A Wind In The Door. The Harry Potter series. Bridge To Terabithia. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The Witches of Wyrm. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Anything at all, in other words, that contains any element of magic that an ultra-self righteous person can point to as being satanist in nature.
Hogwash
This is an egregious piece of bovine scatology. This is not a measure for parents to control the education of their children, it is a measure for the ultra-conservative to control the education of other parents’ children. My child does not need anyone’s permission to read anything she pleases; and how I bring her up is nobody’s business but mine. If the Mella’s object to the presence of the books they have every right to demand a review process to determine if the books are appropriate or not for the milieu, and they can certainly restrict their own child’s access to books. Usurping the parental perogatives of those parents who raise their kids to think for themselves goes well beyond that.
What about innocent until proven guilty?
I have noticed this approach before, you remove the book while you decide if it should be permanently removed. Why is this? This prevents anyone else from seeing the item(s) and making up their own minds to join to argument whether for or against.
And have any of the people who want the item(s) removed ever read the item(s)!? That is what bothers me the most….