Metaphorical Book Burning USA

 Many on the 'conservative' right or 'woke' left in the USA are actually ideologue extremists ...

USA Ideologue Divides Wider Than Ever

 ..... but they don't recognise this fact.

But the logic that sustains their political beliefs, always points to the truth that they are actually intellectually unbalanced. For instance, in the USA some 'democrat' voting states have reached such a state of paralysis over race and crime, that in some places black criminals are now almost immune from prosecution. Whilst some other 'liberal' (democrat) states have also banned books in some schools and libraries, citing them as having racially offensive content .... at least in their eyes.

Meanwhile in other, republican areas, such as Utah, they have now removed the King James Bible from all elementary and middle schools for containing "vulgarity and violence" (noting that the text was never part of students' curriculum ~ religion has traditionally been considered a private matter in the US) after Utah's Republican's passed a law in 2022 banning "pornographic or indecent" books from schools. The book will remain in place in local high schools ... this after the school district's ruling determined that the Bible's content does not actually violate the 2022 law, but does include "vulgarity or violence not suitable for younger students".  

Ken Ivory, the Utah state lawmaker who had written and sponsored the 2022 law, had originally dismissed the Bible removal request as a "mockery" of his aim, but then changed his mind after deciding that the bible was in fact a "challenging read" for younger children "Traditionally, in America, the Bible is best taught, and best understood, in the home, and around the hearth, as a family."

According to a report in the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper, the parent who had initiated the bible ban, had complained saying that the King James Bible "has 'no serious values for minors' because it's pornographic by our new definition", referring to the 2022 book-ban law. The aim of the law was to remove books on subjects such as those on sexual orientation and identity i.e. LGBTALPHABETSOUP and racial identity (e.g. teaching that whites are born racists and minority oppressors) supporting subjects.

These bans on certain books deemed offensive are are also in place in Texas, Florida, Missouri and South Carolina. Whilst students in Kansas requested to have the Bible removed from their school library, and a Texas school district pulled the Bible from library shelves in 2022, after complaints from members of the public opposed to conservatives efforts to ban some books i.e. highlighting how ridiculous these bans are.

Whilst in Virginia, complaints were raised, when a book entitled 'The Black Friend: On Being A Better White Person' (a book reflecting on the micro-aggression that all blacks allegedly suffer from all whites) was added to the school library .... personally I can see why .... it preaches that white people are better with a black friend ... WTF??

But once you start down the road of metaphorical book burning, you get situations such as that where a Tennessee school board removed 'Maus', a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum, because of its alleged profanity and anthropomorphised mouse nudity (I kid you not!). Whilst a school district near Seattle, Washington, has removed the 1960 Harper Lee classic 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from its curriculum, because of its depiction of race relations and use of the racist language used in the 1920's and 1930's (when the book was set).

The use of the 'N' word (now apparently reserved for black people only e.g. black rappers), by characters in John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' has also led to it being removed from school curriculums in school districts in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, and Burbank, California.

The result of all these bans, is that the USA's constitutional defence of 'freedom of speech' is now being made something of a mockery ... at least according to the American Library Association who think that if teenagers seek out information on a topic of interest, they should have access to it ... not just to the information that the most most prudish or censorious of parents have deemed as acceptable to them.

The division that these bans reflect, are both political and in some cases ethnic, with a school board meeting in Flagler County, Florida, to discuss the removal of the book 'All Boys Aren't Blue', which has a black gay theme, devolving into obscenity-laced protests and counter-protests. The board's decision to finally approve the book's use, was ultimately overruled by a local county official who feared legal challenges. In 2021, the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom named it the third most banned and challenged book in the United States of the year.

Classical liberalism in the USA is now apparently dead ~ increasingly your either a woke lefty democrat, or a white conservative republican, in the increasingly fractious USA 2023.