Tiny minority fuels book-banning wave

[Hydra009]

Addicted to censorship: meet Jennifer Petersen, who challenges a book a week and says she won't stop

The majority of all school book challenges in the United States came from just 11 people.

Petersen's district has lurched from one book controversy to another in recent years. In 2021, the Spotsylvania school board voted to remove sexually explicit tomes from libraries, with two members suggesting burning them — remarks that drew national scorn. The board later rescinded that decision. Then, this spring, the superintendent pulled 14 books for "sexually explicit material" — including Toni Morrison's "Beloved" — and suggested shutting down school libraries to address budget shortfalls. That proposal went nowhere, but the school board voted to make it easier to yank books with sexual content.

Much of the turmoil has been driven, directly or indirectly, by Petersen. In the decades before she began filing challenges, the district saw almost no objections, maybe one every five to 10 years, library staff said.

"This whole effort has been a waste of money, time and resources," school board member Nicole Cole said. (The district said it has not tracked the money, time and work it spent responding to Petersen's requests, although a top library staffer estimated that a team of 11 people spent 40 hours per week on her challenges last school year.)

Petersen grew up hating books.

She found texts assigned at school, like the works of Shakespeare or snatches of Paradise Lost, mostly boring.

I mean...  To be fair to The Bard, his works were meant to be plays, so it's a bit like reading the screenplay for The Avengers and expecting to be entertained.

The only book she remembers enjoying was Edgar Allan Poe's collected stories, which she appreciated for their special creepiness.

Edgar Allan Poe is so good that even book-burners like reading his stuff.  :)

[Unbeliever]

If those 11 people want to get rid of books with sexually explicit content, they'll have to ban the Bible... 😉

[Hydra009]

That tactic she has of reading "sexually explicit" passages - almost certainly out of context and in the worst possible light - with the intent of shaming officials for allowing it in schools must work on only very easily-cowed officials. (trust me, if schools carried any-core pornography, 12-year-old me definitely would've found it)

She needs to go up against someone who is so absolutely stonefaced and thick skinned and such an internet-jaded person (we know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two) that the whole boko-haram-Karen thing stops dead in its tracks.

[Unbeliever]

When I was a kid, the closest I could get to porn was National Geographic.

Think she'll ban that?

[ferdmonger]

Reminds me of an old joke about a guy looking for underground pictures of scantily clad young women in bras and panties.  Another guy told him to try the Sears catalog.