Gadfly in the Ointment

Profane Blues
I posted the folowing in YALSA-bk, but I figured it was interesting and important enough to put here, too.

[Start of YLASA-bk post]

A week or so ago, my local paper, The Allentown Morning Call, had a nice article about a school district that had instituted required summer reading for all high school students. (It's commonly required around here in most districts only for honors or AP classes.) On Thursday, there was an article about a parent who was unhappy about the profanity in some of the books. Today, columnist Bill White had a wonderful response to the challenge. It's a very nice example of a rebuttal to a protest, and I thought it was worth sharing. (The links will only be active for seven days after publication.)

Here's the original article:
link to story

Here's the column:
link to column

It's nice to see someone stepping up to the plate like this.

[End of post]

Gail Giles (on LJ as notjazz and on the web as herself), posted an amazing response on YALSA-bk. I'm going to aksk her if I can quote it here. (If so, I'll plug it in later.)

[Edited to add the wise words of Ms. Giles, placed here with her permission.]

Gail said, "Book banning--when I'm asked about it at appearances I reply that it is economic discrimination. Once you pull a book from school or public library shelves you just made sure that only the teen with enough money to spend can read it. And that's usually the same parent that's complaining. So, in essence that parent made sure that students poorer than her own child can't have access to something her child can and probably will read."

For those of you who are really bored, here's an excerpt from the email I sent the columnist. (We correspond on occasion, so he knows I'm a YA writer.)

( Email to columnist )

Okay -- it's not like this is new turf for any of us. I'll get back to short, pithy, pointless stuff on my next post. And yes, for those of you who were wondering, the subject heading is a pun-distorted reference to a song.