http://www.alternet.org/news/149924/america%27s_book_banners_are_back_in_forceOn the website Parents Against Bad Books In Schools, some of the works deemed “sensitive, inappropriate and controversial” for K-12 students, even those who are college-bound or in advanced placement classes, include Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Bad is not for us to determine,” says the disclaimer on the site. “Bad is what you determine is bad.” One of the purposes of PABBIS.org, the disclaimer goes on to say, is to “provide information related to bad books in schools.”
Of course, “bad” is a relative term, and one person’s obscenity is another person’s Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winner. Yet websites like PABBIS.org and Safelibraries.org have become the vanguard for a recent increase in organized attempts to ban books from public libraries and school curricula.
“There are organized groups on the internet whose purpose is to remove books from libraries because they believe they may be inappropriate for children,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. “Traditionally, when books are challenged, it’s usually a single parent. But we have found that groups are organizing around the principle that professional librarians don’t have the expertise, that they’re pushing porn on our kids.”
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