Clearly many of the banishments in the US are influenced by the religious zealots, mainly in the South, but that's not an aspect I wanted to touch on in a tech blog.
Can this be true?
Yes, it is true. While Florida’s Governor DeSantis is leading the “protect our children” movement to ban books and not allow any references to LBGTQ people (called the “Don’t Say Gay” law), other states with MAGA governors and legislatures are falling over themselves to catch up in the Race To The Bottom.
It wasn’t long ago that Americans felt pity and revulsion for countries so backward they banned books. How the mighty have fallen.
The NYT reports that, faced with new, restrictive state laws, school administrators worried about controversy, and parents worried about “political indoctrination,” teachers are dropping many topics and literature from their curricula, among them:
1) Slavery was wrong
2) Christopher Columbus’s journal
3) A data set on police use of force
4) 18th century British philosopher/writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women
5) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men, by revered American authors Mark Twain and John Steinbeck
6) A 30-second Library of Congress video of a “Cakewalk,” showing pre-Civil War era black men and women performing a mocking imitation of the formal dances of white slave owners.
Unbelievable.
Perhaps the very definition of fear of truth and facts.
