1) From Derek Seidman's 4-1-23 TRUTHOUT.org article entitled "Florida Teachers’ Unions Are Front Line of Resistance Against DeSantis’s Fascism," which features an interview with Paul Ortiz, author of AN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINX HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:
We’re facing a regional fascist movement that is also backed by a national reactionary movement. Everyone realizes by now that Ron DeSantis and the people around him in Florida are moving along a fascist tendency. If you follow the careers of people like Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini, DeSantis is borrowing from their playbook, which is to destroy civil society, especially the trade unions [...].
DeSantis is trying to abolish unions, critical race theory and gender studies because these are institutions and theories that help people challenge state power. There was a local news story that came out yesterday where a teacher had been assigning Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to his high school students. Now he’s learning he can no longer assign it.
This is a book that really gives you a sense of possibility and also a critique of society. I read that book as a senior in high school, as the son of combat military veterans. It really changed my life. And yet the state of Florida is trying to stop people from reading things like Slaughterhouse-Five, Toni Morrison, critical race theory, books about LGBT issues.
It’s very much a siege on the entire society, and one that’s being directed by — again — a segment of the American ruling class which is controlling the Florida State legislature.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
2) From Toyin Owoseje's 3-27-23 CNN article entitled "Agatha Christie's Classic Detective Novels Edited to Remove Potentially Offensive Language":
Novels by "Queen of Crime" Agatha Christie are the latest classic works to be revised to remove racist references and other language considered offensive to modern audiences.
According to the UK's The Telegraph newspaper, publisher HarperCollins has edited some passages and entirely removed others from its new digital editions of some of Christie's detective mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
The amendments to the books, published between 1920 and 1976, the year of Christie's death, include changes to the narrator's inner monologue. For example, Poirot's description of another character as "a Jew, of course" in Christie's debut novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," has been stripped out of the new version.
Throughout the revised version of the short story collection "Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories," the word "native" has been replaced with "local," The Telegraph reports.
A passage describing a servant as "black" and "grinning" has been revised and the character is now simply referred to as "nodding," with no reference to his race.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
3) From Elliot Tritto's 3-16-23 WUFT.org article entitled "Fahrenheit 352? What Alachua County Educators Are Saying About Book Removals":
Patrick Gallagher teaches 11th-grade AP
English at Buchholz High School. Teaching English for 26 years,
Gallagher has a master’s degree in educational leadership from the
University of Florida and an educational leadership certificate.
“I love my job. It is the only thing I have ever wanted to do in my entire life,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher’s curriculum has recently been altered by re-evaluating every piece of media.
“Whether it be a book, movie, article or a YouTube video, we have to submit to be approved,” he said.
According to Gallagher, the process
involves a media specialist with a certificate to review the submitted
information. With all his educational background, he feels his degree
means nothing anymore.
“This is completely superfluous,”
Gallagher said. “This is creating a ridiculous amount of work for the
two librarians to have this weight on their shoulders as well because we
already had a process.”
According to Public School Review, Buchholz has over 2,000 students and 84 teachers.
And according to Gallagher, over 30,000 books will be re-evaluated from the school’s library.
Gallagher said there were other
alternative ways to suspend a book before the law was enacted. He said
if enough parents complained, the principal would review if the book was
worth teaching. They can also present it to the Alachua County School
Board.
He said there are three points of
criteria the media specialist has to undergo to define what’s
disapproved: Pornography, child’s comprehension, and ideology.
Gallagher said the first and third criteria are subjective and have no guidance.
Pornography has no definable term.
One of the books Gallagher can no longer teach is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. According to Britannica, “the absurdist, nonlinear work blends science fiction with historical facts, notably Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, during the Allied firebombing of that city in early 1945.”
Gallagher said the book came under scrutiny from the American Library Association at times with profanity and made it inappropriate.
He said a picture depicts half circles, which present the idea of breasts.
“At the end of the day, we have to
define what is pornographic or not,” Gallagher said. “Like the nudity in
a renaissance painting, is it porn or art?”
Regarding ideology, Gallagher said books like The Hate You Give can interpret negative views on police and law enforcement.
“Maybe DeSantis felt this book had a
negative view of police and has 'woke' ideology,” Gallagher. “As he said
in his re-inauguration speech this year, Florida is where woke goes to
die.”
Gallagher feels DeSantis is using the word woke as ‘newspeak’, the propaganda language used in George Orwell’s classic book, 1984.
He feels this was done on purpose by the state’s administration to define things on their terms.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
4) From Jacalyn Wetzel's 3-24-23 UPWORTHY article entitled "Florida Principal Forced to Resign After Showing Michelangelo's 'David' to Students":
If you ask most teachers why they went into education, they'll share that it had nothing to do with the money and everything to do with their passion for teaching. Even with rapid changes in curriculum and policies, teachers who remain in the classroom are lovers of education and are doing their best to help kids learn.
Hope Carrasquilla, the former principal of Florida's Tallahassee Classical School, was one of those teachers who simply enjoyed teaching. As the principal, Carrasquilla was required to teach two classes. During her sixth grade lesson about Renaissance art, which is also a requirement of the school, Carrasquilla showed a picture of Michelangelo's "David" statue.
According to the
Tallahassee Democrat, three parents complained about their children being shown the picture. Two of those parents were mostly upset that there wasn't sufficient notice given before the photo of the sculpture was shown. The third parent reportedly complained that the statue of the Biblical figure was pornographic.
Michelangelo's sculpture wasn't the only source of the complaint. It was essentially the entire lesson, which also included "The Creation of Adam," another Michelangelo piece, and Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." These are classic works of art that are easily recognizable by just about any layman, even if they can't name the artist.
Carrasquilla admitted that there was a bit of a kerfuffle with notifying parents of the lesson, which is a new policy implemented just
two months ago. The policy requires that parents receive written notification two weeks prior to teaching potentially controversial content, according to
The Independent.
Shortly after her lesson, Carrasquilla was called into an
emergency school board meeting where she was forced to choose between resignation or being fired. She chose to resign, leaving the school less than a year after starting her tenure there.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
5) From Bill Galluccio's 3-8-23 KFIAM640.IHEART.com report entitled "'Goosebumps' Author R.L. Stine Says Books Censored Without His Permission":
The author of one of the most popular children's book series claims that the publisher made numerous edits to his works without his permission. A report last week from The Sunday Times found that
Scholastic had made more than 100 edits to several books in the Goosebumps series to remove what it considered offensive and outdated words and phrases.
According to the Times, the changes include describing a character as "cheerful" instead of "plump," while descriptions comparing overweight characters to "a bowling ball" and having "squirrel cheeks" have been removed.
In the book Don't Go to Sleep!, one of the characters called Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina "girl's stuff." That phrase was removed, and now, the character just says the book is "not interesting."
While the Times' initial report said that Stine was on board with the changes, the author tweeted that he had nothing to do with the edits. He replied to a tweet from a fan who expressed her dismay that the books were altered.
"Lindsey, the stories aren't true. I've never changed a word in Goosebumps. Any changes were never shown to me,"
Stine tweeted.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
6) From Andrew Lycett's 2-27-23 INDEPENDENT article entitled "I’m Ian Fleming’s Biographer – There’s No Way James Bond Can Be Made ‘PC’":
Ian Fleming’s books have now followed
Roald Dahl’s and been
pruned of potentially offensive references on the advice of a new tribe of sensitivity readers.
But it’s never a good look to change what an author originally wrote. It smacks of censorship, and there’s seldom much mileage in that [...].
I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s – and society’s – attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming.
The only changes to the text should come from the author [...]. [T]here's no way
Bond's character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Regarding the above matter, novelist Nick Mamatas (author of THE SECOND SHOOTER and many other books) made the following observation on Facebook on 2-26-23:
Another scene in the book, set during a strip tease at a Harlem nightclub, was originally “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.” This has been revised to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”
Of course, the main locus of racism in the UK—the very existence of the Queen as the figurehead of imperialism—will remain intact across all volumes.
7) From Elizabeth Blair's 1-11-23 NPR report entitled "A Play About Censorship Is Censored — and Free Speech Groups Are Fighting Back":
PEN America and two other free speech groups are drawing national attention to Florida county school officials' decision to cancel a play that is itself about censorship.
Last week, Duval County Public School officials canceled a production of Paula Vogel's Indecent at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. Officials said the play about a play about a love affair between two women is "inappropriate," as reported by WJCT.
PEN America, along with The National Coalition Against Censorship and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund released a statement condemning the decision and "urged school officials to rescind their decision and work with students to stage the play as planned."
Indecent is about the controversy surrounding a 1923 Broadway production of God of Vengeance, a Yiddish play by Sholem Asch. In the story, the daughter of a Jewish brothel owner falls in love with one of her father's prostitutes. Asch's script includes a love scene between the two women. The play was a hit in Europe and New York's downtown theater scene. But once it was translated into English and performed on Broadway, the entire cast was arrested and charged with obscenity.
The free speech organizations wrote that
Indecent explores "LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, censorship, and antisemitism in the early 20th Century — themes which have striking relevance to the issues facing society today." They pointed out that Douglas Anderson's recent productions include
RENT and
Chicago, shows with, "as much, if not more, 'sexual dialogue' as is conveyed in
Indecent."
"If vaguely-defined 'adult sexual dialogue' is reason enough to ban plays from school productions," the statement continued, "these, and many other canonical productions would be banned from student theaters —
Romeo and Juliet for depicting sexually active teens,
Oedipus Rex for its incestual themes, and other works that have serious literary and artistic value for students and community members."
Paula Vogel herself has also taken up the cause of her play's cancelation. The Pulitzer Prize winner released a
statement and, according to an interview with PEN America, offered to meet with the school board. She also recorded a podcast with the student actors.
"What does surprise me is the courage of this high school student for speaking out and the courage of the students in that cast," she
told PEN America. "The faculty and the administration have principally been silenced. I am fearing for their jobs. ... censorship of the arts is always the first step towards totalitarianism, and ultimately, towards genocide."
To read the entire report, click HERE.
