The attempted cancellation of Ray Luc Levasseur’s talk at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, under pressure from Governor Patrick’s office, raises serious concerns not only about the state of academic freedom at the University but also about the Governor’s respect for the First Amendment. UMass, in an effort to educate students about the social unrest that occurred during the [...]
This year we received triple the amount of submissions than usual, and were very impressed! We usually choose 10 semi-finalists, but this time we simply had to make room for 13. We congratulate the semi-finalists and all our applicants for their hard work and excellent ideas! Jordan Allen Nathaniel Dueber Aaron Dunbar Taylor Dunlap and Caroline Dunaway Jovan Landry Lauren [...]
[Dr. Marty Klein – a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified Sex Therapist, and sociologist with a special interest in public policy and sexuality – is our guest blogger today! We post from his great blog, Sexual Intelligence, from October 25.] This week is WRAP Week: White Ribbons Against Pornography. Sponsored by groups including Concerned Women for America (CWA) and [...]
On Monday, October 19th, the Yes Men, a group of artist/political activists, set up a mock website that looked like the Chamber of Commerce’s, and held a mock press conference where they announced that the Chamber was shifting its opposition to serious efforts to address global warming. Major news sources were fooled into reporting the story. In response, the Chamber [...]
Today is the deadline for our contest Free Speech in Schools: Does it Exist? Students 19 and younger are encouraged to film their response in 4min or less for the chance to win up to $1000 and a scholarship to the New York Film Academy. See more details at Youth Free Expression Network or even apply online now! According to [...]
Today, Monday, October 19th the National Coalition Against Censorship is celebrating its 35th Anniversary! Since 1974, NCAC has fought hundreds of attempts to regulate speech including criticizing the results of Meese Report in 1986, opposing the censorship of films like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and The Tin Drum, and taking a firm stand in ongoing controversies over public [...]
The Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina will be spending this Halloween burning books and music its deemed Satan's work - including all non-King James versions of the Bible. Attendees will enjoy barbeque chicken and all the sides while they burn works written by the Pope and Mother Teresa among others. Pastor Marc Grizzard says there is a [...]
Which of these images would also be illegal if a 1999 law, heard on October 6, 2009 by the US Supreme Court, were to be upheld? Remember – we are talking about images, not the acts themselves. video from circus companies showing workers hooking elephants and striking tigers; footage from factory farms where farmers are beating sick turkeys to death [...]
It's our 35th Anniversary! The typical gift for 35 years of marriage is jade or coral - well, we won't hand out earrings or take you deep sea diving, but we DO have an exciting evening planned to benefit NCAC and honor renowned and much-censored author Judy Blume! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2009 for A Night of Comedy [...]
On September 29th, Wyoming City Schools' School Board voted to back Superintendent, Gail Kist-Kline's plan to re-evaluate every non-textbook teachers recommend to students. Staff members will now be asked to rate books based on a new 4-point criteria, which inclues the extent to which a book "could create controversy among students, parents and community groups. However, removing books from reading [...]
Later this month the Kids' Right to Read Project will interview John Coy, author of YA novels Box Out and Crackback, and would like your help designing the interview. Crackback was challenged in September at a school in Helena, Alabama. Coy worked with KRRP and the local Library Media Specialist in support of the right to read and so we [...]
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee Thanks to everyone who participated on twitter, facebook, and this blog with listing your favorite banned books! You wrote about books you read in high school and those that changed your perspectives. You testified about [...]
Some good and bad news for you today, folks, on the fifth day of Banned Books Week… First the good news: In Pennsylvania, Downingtown West High School followed model procedure in addressing a challenge against Laurie Halse Anderson’s Twisted. We are please to report school officials and parents resolved the issue amicably through discussion. For more information click here. Also [...]
Its Banned Books Week and yet efforts to censor books in the U.S.A continue. In fact, just this past week, Ellen Hopkins, author of the Banned Books Week Manifesto was censored in Norman, Oklahoma. According to Ms. Hopkins, "I was supposed to do a school visit at Whittier Middle School. A parent went in complaining about content in CRANK and [...]
On Monday, we reported on the Kids' Right to Read Project's response to a challenge in North Pocono High School against Laurie Halse Anderson's book Speak. We have since learned North Pocono is not the only place in PA where Ms. Anderson's writing may be censored. Her novel, Twisted, which tackles serious teenage concerns about sex, alcohol, grades and family [...]
On Monday, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski announced the commission’s support of net neutrality, a principle which holds that Internet Service Providers (e.g. Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T) should not be permitted to discriminate against specific online content or applications and privilege other content with higher quality service. In introducing the National Broadband Plan, Genachowski, described some of the threats to an open internet posed [...]
The Kids' Right to Read Project is urging the general public to speak out against book censorship at two high schools, one in Pennsylvania and the other in California where Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle are being challenged. KRRP is calling on supporters of free speech to advocate for students’ right to read everywhere, especially [...]
Under an onslaught of vocal protests that President Obama’s “stay in school and study hard” speech was a means to “indoctrinate” children into “socialist” values and the President’s political “agenda” schools and whole school districts decided not to show the speech. For a partial list of schools and school districts that have canceled the speech click here. Nobody equipped with [...]
Ellen Hopkins, author of numerous Young Adult titles as well as most recently, the Banned Books Week Manifesto is being censored in Norman, Oklahoma. Hopkins was scheduled to speak at Whittier Middle School on September 22nd about her experiences as an author writing about real life issues facing youth today. However, her talk was reportedly cancelled by the district's superintendent [...]
As Benjamin Franklin rolled over in his grave, the Pennsylvania State Senate discussed Wednesday night whether all of Philadelphia's 54 libraries will have to close on October 2. Mayor Michael Nutter's Plan C, or "Doomsday," budget will start to go into effect on Friday unless enough state senators vote to pass a 1% sales tax hike. The plan, which the [...]
The deadline has been extended for our contest Free Speech in Schools: Does it Exist? Students 19 and younger are encouraged to film their response in 4min or less for the chance to win up to $1000 and a scholarship to the New York Film Academy. See more details on our website ncac.org or even apply online now! According to [...]
On Wednesday, September 9th , the Supreme Court reheard arguments in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (see our coverage of this case here and here). The issues addressed in the rehearing were much broader than the question whether Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute documentary attacking Hilary Clinton, may be considered electioneering communication. As Marjorie Heins of [...]
Earlier this year, we covered Citizens United v. FEC, a Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of federal election laws. As we explained in April, “the Court, among other things, needs to determine whether Hillary: The Movie, a 90 minute documentary about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign with a decidedly conservative bias, is considered an “electioneering communication,” or a political editorial [...]
In August, 2007, Debbie Almontaser was the interim principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn, an Arabic language public high school she had worked with the New York City Department of Education for two years to establish. Though the school was secular (a point Almontaser sought to emphasize by naming the school for the famous Christian Lebanese poet), [...]
Touch every book. Char every page. Burn every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible... The NCAC is excited to present the Banned Books Week 2009 Manifesto written by Ellen Hopkins, author of several verse novels on teenage struggles, including Crank, Burned, Impulse and most recently, Tricks. We here at the NCAC want to know what you are doing this year [...]
The arrest of Zach Hyman’s nude model during a photo shoot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was predictable in spite of the irony of the location. Whereas marble and oil nudes are usually left at peace (not always though: art containing nudity is a frequent target of censorship), a living woman posing naked for an artist is guilty of [...]
In April we reported on a book challenge after two parents called for the removal of Maureen Johnson's The Bermudez Triangle and Ceicly von Ziegesar's Gossip Girls: Only in Your Dreams from the Leesburg Public Library. In June, we were excited to offer an update full of good news. Yet somehow we are still holding our breath... On Monday the [...]
The Brooklyn Public Library trusts you to form your own opinions about any controversial and provocative content that you would find in Beloved, Hard Candy or Mein Kampf. However, apparently they feel the need to protect you from racially insensitive material in the cartoon from almost 80 years ago TinTin Au Congo. The NYTimes today reports that [...]
The Effingham Helen Matthes Library Board in Effingham, Illinois voted unanimously to deny a request to censor Living Dead Girl, a novel by Elizabeth Scott. Local parent, Amy Hibdon formally requested that the book be removed from the library, or at least the teen section, after her 15-year-old daughter checked out the book and was reportedly upset by the content [...]
The NY Times reports today that Yale University Press has not only decided to remove the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad from "Cartoons that Shook the World" by Jytte Klausen; they have decided that all images of Muhammad have to go on the recommendation of a group of "diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism". "...they suggested that the Yale [...]
Being so busy with campaigns promoting “freedom and democracy” in the Middle East and central Asia, it’s hardly surprising that most of us here in the United States are unaware of an archaic and abominable practice that continues here at home - book banning. The Kids’ Right to Read Project (KRRP), a collaboration of NCAC and the American Booksellers Foundation [...]
While Congress has been busy protecting animals from cruelty at the expense of the First Amendment (See U.S. v Stevens) elsewhere it has been legislating away the First Amendment rights of animal cruelty protesters to protect corporate profits. Last month, a federal court in Northern California heard oral arguments on a motion to dismiss in United States v. Buddenberg, the [...]
Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate today as the newest member of the Supreme Court, replacing Justice David H. Souter who retired in June. She becomes the 111th member of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the third woman and first Hispanic to serve on it. What does her confirmation mean for the First Amendment? See our [...]
Having trouble accessing a website? Suspect it might be more than just a faulty connection or technical malfunction? Visit Herdict.org, a website designed to track reports of censored web sites around the world. There, you can report anonymously that a site is inaccessible and see if other people are having the same problem. There is no way to determine whether [...]
Once again, a software company reveals its power over our access to information by making a dumb decision. This time, Apple rejected a dictionary application, Ninjawords, because it included words Apple deemed inappropriate. According to an interview by John Gruber with Ninjawords developer Phil Crosby, Apple refused to upload Ninjawords to the iTunes store until a number of “objectionable” [...]
The New York Times ran an article this past Saturday, "Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud", about how GE and NewsCorp enforced a kind of "cease-fire" – otherwise known as corporate censorship - on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. While I’ve always found the battle between Olberman and O’Reilly to be exhausting (though admittedly entertaining), the [...]
Amazon.com is facing a class-action lawsuit for remotely deleting two George Orwell titles, 1984 and Animal Farm, from all its customers’ Kindles. Justin Gawronski, 17, a Michigan high school student, and Antoine J. Bruguier, a California Kindle user, claim that Amazon had no right to remove the books from their wireless e-book devices. The knowledge that Amazon has that “technological [...]
Health education that consists of only an abstinence-only message has disturbing consequences. By depriving teenagers of access to information about their health and bodies in schools, it makes them vulnerable to STD/s and unwanted early pregnancies. The problems of censoring sexual health education are reflected in a recent report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The report [...]
When I first heard that Fred Phelps, the famous anti-gay activist, planned to protest the funeral of one of the modern heroes of journalism, the late Walter Cronkite, I thought I had missed something in The New York Times obituary. I combed through it again, revisiting those classic moments in broadcast history that have been replayed over and over: the [...]
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week in an important Supreme Court free speech case, NCAC, joined by the College Art Association, warned that a law banning depictions of animal cruelty violates the First Amendment right to free speech, and the exemption it provides for work with “serious value” rings hollow, given the long history of censorship of disturbing or unpopular [...]