Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
Scholastic Backtracks on Excluding Gay Friendly Book From Fair

So the Scholastic “Harbinger of Commercialised Crap, Not Books” School Book Fair organisation decides to demand that an author revise her book before they’d ship it out to schools for their book fairs – specifically, asking her to leave out some “naughty words” and beyond that, change a homosexual parenting couple in the story to a heterosexual one.

The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as “geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple. Myracle agreed to get rid of the offensive language “with the goal—as always—of making the book as available to as many readers as possible,” but the deal breaker was changing Milla’s two moms.

“A child having same-sex parents is not offensive, in my mind, and shouldn’t be ‘cleaned up.’” says Myracle, adding that the book fair subsequently decided not to take on Luv Ya Bunches because they wanted to avoid letters of complaint from parents.

But! Lo and behold, people have gotten wind and have been, um, firmly chastising Scholastic for the move. So now Scholastic is backtracking – probably realising that it’s bad (although perhaps originally unintentional on their part) to think of censoring books out of a nationwide school book fair set-up (that not only do they have a disgusting monopoly on, but have increasingly crapped up with commercialised toys and not books) just because said book portrays homosexual family structures.

What I really want to know, though, is what David Anaxagoras is asking: Since when is “Geez” suddenly too harsh of language for kids? I suspect if the people making this decision had spent any time actually in a school, they’d encounter a lot worse of language than that from the kids.

If we expect literature and books to make any difference in kids’ lives, then we have to not sacrifice their honesty for what’s politically smart.

Oct 29, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #