oh good grief

'Oral sex' definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools | Books | guardian.co.uk:

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – "[it's] a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern," said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. "It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

Why don't parents just have curiosity itself banned and be done with the whole problem?

or is the problem worse: "The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect."

the good griefing continues...

Texas BOE Bans Children's Book Author : Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

Just how utterly clueless are the religious right intelli-phobes on the Texas State Board of Education? They banned a children's book author with a very common name because one of the dolts on the board did an Amazon search and found a different author with the same name had written a book about Marxism.

What do the authors of the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?

Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

To make matters worse, there's a crazy he-said-she-said on who was actually responsible for doing the "research" on the Bill Martin's...and none of the board members had actually read the "marxist" book (which itself seems more a continuation of Marx's legitimate critiques of Capitalism from an ethical standpoint)...nor, it seems, the banned children's book for that matter.

I'm waiting for them to also ban some Marillion albums since their album covers were done by Bill Martin Studios.

the good griefing continues...graphical form

btw, there's a picture of Michele Obama reading the book to a classroom on Bill Martin's web site, so now it also must be a Muslim plot as much as a Communist one, right?