Acting on complaints from a parent, Olentangy Ohio District Superintendent Scott Davis removed Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones from Liberty High School's optional summer reading list. Visit the Columbus Dispatch for details. Below is NCAC's letter to Superintendent Davis. Click here to send him an email [...]
The book Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher, has become controversial in Grand Rapids, Michigan, because one of the stories contains the word "nigger." After a parent complained, the teacher was suspended and the book was removed from the schools, including the libraries. Controversy over racially sensitive themes and language is not new. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is [...]
Dear Member of Texas State Board of Education, We write to express our concern about the proposed changes to the Biology Textbook under consideration for adoption by the Texas State Board of Education. We urge you not to adopt the changes proposed by the Discovery Institute, because doing so will undermine the presentation of information about evolution. At the public [...]
Resources Letter to Chairman Roy Hartz Protesting Soap Box Derby Censorship July 16, 2003 Roy Hartz Chairman, Board of Trustees All-American Soap Box Derby Dear Mr. Hartz, The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the organizations listed below are writing to protest efforts by the All-American Soap Box Derby to censor Melanie Payne's book, Champions, Cheaters and Childhood [...]
Newsday September 16, 2002 In the post 9/11 world, there is undoubtedly a government official whose job is to invent innocuous-sounding, if not reassuring, acronyms for government initiatives against terrorism. Operation TIPS is a case in point. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System will recruit millions of utility, transportation and other workers to report on "potentially unusual or suspicious [...]
It's fitting that one of the two books we've chosen to inaugurate the Free Expression Policy Project Book Page has itself become a target of censorship pressures.
A number of critics have taxed Not in Front of the Children with being insufficiently sensitive to the concerns of parents about sexual explicitness and graphic violence in popular culture. It's true that the book doesn't decry all the gross and offensive entertainment that is available—there is already a vast literature on that subject. My purpose instead was to stimulate [...]
Free expression won out when school superintendent Gary Feenstra withdrew most of the restrictions he had imposed on the use of Harry Potter books. Following the advice of an advisory committee, Feenstra agreed to put the books back in the elementary and middle school libraries and to permit students to borrow them without restrictions. He also agreed to permit classroom readings of [...]
Dr. Marvin E. Edwards Superintendent School District U-46 355 East Chicago Street Elgin, IL 60120 Dear Dr. Edwards, We write to urge you to reinstate Judy Blume’s novel, Forever, in the middle school libraries in District 46. According to recent news reports, the decision to remove the book, and the desire to keep it out now, are based on disapproval [...]
William J. Ivey, Chairman National Endowment for the Arts The Nancy Hanks Center 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, DC 20506-0001 Dear Chairman Ivey, We are writing to urge you to reconsider your decision to withdraw funding for The Story of Color, the Mexican folktale for children published by Cinco Puntos Press. According to press reports, the decision was based [...]
Most Americans - 93 percent according to a recent Freedom Forum poll - say they believe in the First Amendment. A recent incident in Hauppauge illustrates something else the poll revealed: Many Americans really don't understand it.
I write to express my serious concerns about your decision to remove three magazines from the Hauppauge Middle School Library. If press reports are accurate, as our inquiries suggest they are, removal of the magazines was precipated, in whole or in part, by a local religious figure who urged parishioners to object to them because they contain "information that goes against what we believe is the truth about sex as Catholic Christians."
LOS ANGELES TIMES Friday, October 17, 1997 The first round of papers has been filed in a federal appeals court in San Francisco challenging the constitutionality of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. At the same time, the new movie version of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita, starring Jeremy Irons, is opening all over Europe, even though it is not [...]
NEWSDAY Tuesday, August 5, 1997 What can explain the fact that The Tin Drum could win an Academy Award for best foreign film and Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, and be faced with the claim that it is "obscene" and "child pornography" in 1997? Were we all blind to obscenity and child pornography then? [...]
NEW YORK, N.Y. - National anti-censorship groups representing librarians, artists, writers, booksellers, religious leaders and educators today denounced on-going efforts by Oklahoma City authorities to suppress a wide range of First Amendment-protected material, including the Academy Award-winning film, The Tin Drum. The National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Campaign for Free Expression, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the American [...]
Fueled by the crusade led by Randall Terry and Focus On The Family against the photographer Jock Sturges, Tennessee prosecutors have charged Barnes & Noble with violating state obscenity law by displaying The Last Day of Summer and Radiant Identities by Sturges and The Age of Innocence by David Hamilton in its Brentwood store.
Penny Culliton, a New Hampshire teacher who fought back against attempts to smear and ultimately fire her, has been reinstated by the Mascenic School Board following a decision of the state's Public Employee Labor Relations Board. The Labor Board upheld an arbitrator's previous award that had turned Culliton's dismissal into a one-year suspension.
Click here to download a PDF of Vonnegut's remarks on censorship and literature from a January 16, 1986 briefing on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, organized by NCAC.