Far-Right Group Wants to Ban Kids From Reading Books on Male Seahorses, Galileo, and MLK

[Jilly_in_VA]

School books about Martin Luther King Jr. are too “divisive,” claims a conservative group at the center of a Tennessee book ban battle. A story about the astronomer Galileo Galilei is “anti-church.” A picture book about seahorses is too sexy.

As the school year resumes, simmering fights over school books have returned to a boil. In some schools, like in Pennsylvania’s Central York School District this week, students have beaten back bans on books about racism. But elsewhere, like in Tennessee’s Williamson County School District, the battle is ongoing, bolstered by new state laws that ban the teaching of certain race-related topics. At the heart of that fight is a conservative group, led by a private-school parent, that has a sprawling list of complaints against common classroom books. Many of the books are about race, but other targets include dragons, sad little owls, and hurricanes.

Registering its website in late 2020, the group “Moms For Liberty” is one of a series of conservative education groups to spring up in the wake of 2020’s racial justice protests. The group is currently involved in battles against in-school mask mandates, as well as a particularly heated fight over school books in Tennessee’s Williamson County.

In June, the group’s leader, who does not have children in the district, authored a letter to the Tennessee Department of Education, complaining that the district’s curriculum violated a new state law against the teaching of some race-related subjects in public schools. (That law, one of multiple enacted over the past year on state and local levels, faced strong criticism, with opponents warning that it would impede teaching about racism in American history.) The MFL letter specifically took issue with curriculum items about Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, protests during the Civil Rights Movement, and school segregation.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/far-right-group-wants-to-ban-kids-from-reading-books-on-male-seahorses-galileo-and-martin-luther-king-jr?ref=home
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I wish people would mind their own goddam business!

[Firestorm49]

1. And the American Taliban continues to crawl out from the rocks.

[Ocelot II]

2. Galileo?

They don't want kids to know that Galileo was accused of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life by the Inquisition for having the temerity to point out the truth, that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the opposite, which was church doctrine at the time. WTF? Back to the seventeenth century, kids.

Eppur se muove.

[Sympthsical]

10. One of my favorite bits about the Roman Inquisition and Galileo

Is that he basically worked around it with, "Hey man, it's just a theory!" and that he was merely playing Devil's advocate (in this case, literally).

But hey, no burning. Kinda worked out.

[underpants]

3. Laugh all you want but you and I both know ho damned sexy seahorses can be

[Aristus]

4. Waitwaitwait; Holdonholdon.

I'm still stuck on they find seahorses sexy...

Lot to unpack there...

[Hekate]

5. Well, when the mommy seahorse and the daddy seahorse love each other very much...

When seahorses mate, the female inserts her ovipositor into the male's brood pouch (an external structure that grows on the body of the male) and deposits her unfertilized eggs into the pouch. The male then releases sperm into the pouch to fertilize the eggs.

Seems about right to me. And so very arousing.

[rickyhall]

7. Their problem is gay seahorses, totally unnatural or something, they say.

[Hekate]

8. Like having the male hold the fertilized eggs in his brood-pouch wouldn't set them off ...

…in the first place. Those are some disgusting humans, if you ask me.

[Deuxcents]

9. Male seahorses

“Baby sit” the fertilized eggs until they get out on their own. Sharing parenting responsibilities is a bad thing to teach? This banning of books n movies n complaining about what they like n don’t like has gone too far. Change the channel. Don’t read the book. Do they just think choice is for taking the vaccines?

[Hekate]

11. This kind of attempted censorship has been going on for years. As my late father used to say...

“The world is full of idiots.”

[gratuitous]

6. Coincidental

I'm currently reading Mario Livio's book "Galileo and the Science Deniers" (2020) and Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover" (2008). The bullshit just never stops.