Discussions
Pro Gay Marriage? It's an uphill battle - even for penguins.
Posted by techfun • 9/17/07 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: banned books, homosexuality, Libraries, Penguins
As I pointed out on blog.techfun.org/scary-gay-penguins there are people challenging the rights of libraries to carry a book about the true story of two male penguins raising a baby penguin.
This book was the number one Children's book challenged this year, based on reports to the American Library Association. Four of the top ten challenged books were challenged due to homosexual content. I haven't read them all, but if the #1 most challenged book is about REAL live penguins, I have doubts about the validity of other books people want banned.
For those folks in the last few days who came out in support of gay marriage, thats wonderful;! For those who didn't, do you feelings run so deep that you would complain about a library carrying a book about the true story of a penguin chick with two daddies?
User Comments
-
i've heard/read numerous reports of those penguins over the years. during one interview, a zookeeper gleefully pointed out that this couple had one of the best nests in the best neighborhood ... and it was immaculately clean. i think she was reveling in working in as many "it's not natural" stereotypes as she could during the interview. it was highly amusing.
i tend to think no books should be banned. i think more parents need to take responsibility for being confident in the way in which they are raising their children. and if they're not that confident ... maybe they aren't paying enough attention ....
but what do i know? i don't have any kids.-
I don't have any either but if I did, I doubt I could support banning a book. I might be selective of what I let MY child read, based on age appropriateness and my own values, but trying to take that decision away from everyone else is bit too paternalistic for me.
-
yep ... altho i feel the same way about music and tv and such as well ...
-
-
I don't understand why gay marriage is even an issue to talk about when our country is at war. I never truly understand how people can expel so much energy on something like this. Let gays get married and lets get busy with an exit strategy.-
I think it is because it crosses into the realm of a religious issue for people who wish that a separation between church and state did not exist.
Not only that, people feel that they can make a difference about this issue. They have seen what kind of non-action we are getting from Washington on the war issue. -
For some people anything that threatens the gender order threatens the very social fabric of the nation.
A little history: In France during the Paris Commune (1871) there arose an image of women who burned buildings, female incendiaries. To make these stereotype work, they framed them as hags. But the implicit threat in the "respectable" press was that not only were the people in the Paris Commune threatening the political and social order, but the gender order, the very fabric of society. Chaos would be the result. Such fears helped to justify the rather draconian measures taken against the Communards. (For more, see Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris.)
-
-
Off-topic, sort of: A popular theme for books in New Hampshire was the story of a moose that hung out with a cow one year. No idea what their sex was. The two just enjoyed each other's company.
-
I remember that!
-
-
Can I ask what does killing the enemy in their own backyard have to do with the topic?
BTW, I'm glad I didn't grow up with two dads or two mommies. Not really feeling the whole gay "rights" thing.-
Wait till it goes from being an abstract issue to something that affects good friends of yours. And if you have no gay friends, just wait. It will happen. Once you put a human face on the issue, you might begin to care about it.
-
The purpose of this discussion wasn't so much to debate gay rights. Gay rights, like abortion, or free trade are much debated and argued but rarely if ever, does anyone change their minds.
I was more interested in where people's views are on a continuum. Opposing gay marriage is one thing. To me, protesting a book that recounts an actual event, in this case two male penguins raising a chick, is beyond that and into a kind of irrational kneejerk response that makes discussion pointless.
So far, nobody here has said they would protest a book like that, despite several who opposed gay marriage. That is promising. Or maybe I just haven't given it enough time.
-
-
Thank you for underlining that point again.
-
It's up to the parents if they want their child to read books about this Topic.
I don't think libraries should make the decisions parents should be making.-
zawadi, I completely agree that parents should decide what they want their children to read. But, being more precise, I feel parents should decide what books to allow THEIR own children to read and that is all.
When a parent challenges a book in the way the book under discussion here they are trying to decide not only for their own child, but for everyone else's children as well by having the book removed from the library's collection. -
The whole point of getting a library card when I was a child was so that I could choose what books I wanted to read-- not have that decision made by an adult. My parents, teachers, and librarians all understood that for children to grow up into adults that read, they need to see reading as something they want to do-- and they need some freedom to do that.
Of course, they clearly had strange expectations that I grow into intelligent, articulate individual with a university education and an ability to make some sense of the larger world-- and we all know how dangerous that is to the social order.
Now my parents were not so fond of the fact I read comic books, since they thought it an inferior literary genre, but they never banned comics from the house.
-
-
I live in a state that has had same sex marriage for nearly four years.
It hasn't broken up families or destroyed our social order. In fact, we still have the lowest divorce rate in the U.S.A.
Oh yes, and it is a matter of equality. If your church is against same sex marriage, the law doesn't force your church to host the ceremony. That's part of the separation betwen church and state. Churches aren't forced to endorse practices that don't like.
In fact, I dare say, our practice in Massachusetts regarding fairness in marriage hasn't hurt our penguins either.-
Mass. huh. hi neighbor... In Rhode Island here
-
-
Well i don't oppose gay marriage and i most certainly don't oppose a book about penguins, thats just plain daft.-
Just curious about libraries in the UK. Are they centrally funded? In the US they often get grants from the federal government but much of the funding comes from the town or city where its located. As a result, local people have an easier time pushing their views and desires for censorship by threatening local politicians who have to vote on local spending on libraries.
-
Ermmm no idea! I think they are run by the local county council's but all the money is from the Government.
-
-
Here's an interesting page on banned books:
onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html-
I knew about a lot of those. I live in Philadelphia and Walt Whitman is from this area (we even have a bridge named for him) so Leaves of Grass tends to show up in bookstores and on student reading lists around here.
"The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear."
Thats just really sad.
-
-
My fourth grade class studied Macbeth and acting out scenes in an elementary school Shakespeare competition (and now as an adult, I am rehearsing for a production.)
The revolting thing is that we are cutting young people off from the cultural heritage that rightfully belongs to all English speaking peoples.
Well, at least they aren't reading Christopher Marlowe's Edward II-- that one is about a homosexual king and his boyfriend! Those awful Englishmen! They let a gay man become king! Best to keep our American youth away from such filth-- better they watch TV.-
I don't even remember that aspect of the play. Not mentioned in my highschool class, perhaps, and me naive enough not to notice? Well, it was the late seventies, and I was living in northern New England.
-
Christopher Marlowe isn't so widely read in high school today though he was an important playwright of the Elizabethean era. It was a rather amazing period in English theatre-- and while Shakespeare was foremost, he did have company. Edward II is the most explicitly homoerotic work of the era and revolves around a coup d'etat against King Edward on the grounds that certain factions within the court think his lover is a dangerous influence.
Derek Jarman directed a film version as well that's worth viewing.
Macbeth, on the other hand, is filled with graphically violent language. The first speech of the play (which yours truly performs) explicitly describes to the mutilation and dismemberment of MacDonwald-- and it's a fun speech to perform.
Hamlet has a lot of sexual innuendo-- and Freud's interpretation (in light of the Oedipal complex) has become a popular reading over the past century.
So evidently these plays are not fit for young people-- even though young people went to the theatre in Shakespeare's time. -
Does that play include the hot poker incident?
-
Hot poker incident? I don't remember one in Macbeth and Hamlet-- and it was a long time ago that I saw Edward II-- I do recall some torture.
Still, the idea that we restrict access to our civilization's literary heritage because our great writers wrote about the human experience: lust, anger, sexuality, love, rage, depression, doubt, et cetera is ridiculous.
Why don't we ban "1984" and "Brave New World" while we're at it (or require parental permission?) -
THe hot poker incident I was referring it is mentioned here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II_of_England#Death -
I haven't seen the play recently enough to recall exactly what means of torture were used.
-
-
Anyway, the opponents of same-sex marriage are fighting a losing battle. Back when it first became an issue debated in the mainstream media (early 1990s as I recall) only 10% of the population was in support-- now about half the American population supports the idea of same sex marriage. In ten years, most people will likely support it because more and more straight people will realize they have friends and family who are gay or lesbian and will want them to be happy, because this is a generational issue to some extent and the generation that tends to be more homophobic will simply die off, and because in places where same-sex marriage is legal, it will become obvious that the fabric of society isn't ripped apart, but rather strengthened-- remember that it's in those "Bible Belt" states where divorce rates run highest.
-
Very true.
Disclaimer: I am gay.
When i grew up in South Florida I didn't know any openly gay people. Looking back I can now see that there were at least two one gay male and one lesbian couple in town. Both of these pairings were between people of the World War II generation so they were already in late middle age when I was a kid in the 1970's. I doubt it would have ever occurred to them to come out and act as a role model or at least a beacon for a young gay kid like myself.
In that same town now, even though I don;t live there, my nieces and nephews know about gay people. They know me and my partner, they know the band teacher, and they know other folks that are part of the community.
When I grew up I thought I was completely alone. I survived it by fleeing at 13 and moving up to Philadelphia where there was an active gay community. I think the visible presence of gay people in most communities now is playing a big role in the apparent decline in suicide rates among gay and lesbian teenagers from its heights in the 70's and 80's when gay kids were thought to be 25 times more likely to kill themselves than heterosexual young people.
-
-
Losing battle? Maybe. But remember how much progress Jews made in Germany in the nineteenth century? Nasty comparison that I make only to caution against any belief in inevitability. Human rights seem to need fighting for, over and over again.
-
I don't dispute that we must always be vigilant in defending human rights and opposing any regression, but we should also keep in mind with the example of Germany between 1933 and 1945 is that it was a very graudual process from the election of the Nazi party to the expropriation of the wealth and rights of the German Jews community to their enslavement and deportation to their concentration and extermination.
This process could only have begun if the majority of Germans bore some anti-Semitic animus. With about half of all Americans now supporting equal marriage rights, those with a real homophobic animus are losing numbers. Homophobia, even violent homophobia, will be with us for a while (getting that last 25% to support full equality is going to be hard), but I suspect that we are going to be getting to a point where some Republicans (especially in the north eastern states and on the west coast) are going to have to run as pro-gay rights Republicans and Democrats are going to have to universally support marriage equality. -
Like I should have also said, my analogy was ridiculous. I was just cautioning against too much optimism. I don't dispute the trend. Though I do think it will be ages before it moves beyond the level of the states, and a backlash is always possible.
-
I think optimism is completely justified if you can keep in mind that its a long term trend. Despite Darfur and what is going on in Iraq right now, the long term trend of quality of life for people around on the world is steadily moving up. (How long that can continue as more people compete for resources that are not growing at the same pace as the world's population is a completely different discussion.)
Day to day quality of life for gays and lesbians have steadily improved since the 1960's. I am completely out at work but I work with an older gentleman who has only recently come out - at the age of 59. -
I can't speak for the rest of the country, but as a school teacher, it seems to me that teenagers in east coast cities have a lot less of a coming out crisis than my Gen-X friends did.
-
-
I understood the spirit in which the analogy was offered. I realize that since you are a professional historian, anytime you offer an analogy, it should always be assumed that the caveat is intended.
Speaking of which-- you might find my last few blog posts interesting. -
I am totally for gay marriage, everyone should have the right to a divorce. hehe. But in all seriousness, i am for it.
It just scares the beejesus out of people. -
is there a remote possibility that such videos & acts (same sex in animal kingdom), being engineered to suit the taste of a group. sometimes conveniences & commercialism force us to be opportunistic too...
am-not-ok.blogspot.com/2007/08/abnormal-sexual-behaviour.html-
Watch out! Gay scientists are out to get us!
Be serious. Rather a bizarre conspiracy, no? And dragging out sex between humans and other species to discredit this movement. Awful. Cynical. Yuk . . . -
Bait and switch techniques like that have always been around. I know conservatives who, with a straight face, can stand in front of you, look you in the eye, and tell you that they can's support gay marriage because it will lead to people to want the right to marry their pet, or an immediate family member.
-
Has it occured to anyone that Larry Craig's straight marriage might have led to him soliciting anonymous public sex in an airport bathroom?
-
Add Your Comment
Login to leave a message.
