Culpepper County, Virginia Bans Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl

Photo: AP

Remember Anne Frank? The little girl who spent two years of her life hidden in an attic with her family and others, and then spent seven months in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp before dying of typhus? We know about Anne and the hopes and dreams of a young girl because of the diary she wrote that she received on her 13th birthday. This diary became the only outlet for her deepest thoughts and feelings and as such, is very personal. It gives us a view of the Holocaust that is unlike any other we have been given. The Culpepper County, Virginia, public schools have banned the book, The Definitive Edition, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, because of the objections of one parent over one passage:

When the book was originally published, Anne's father Otto redacted about 30% of the diary because of comments Anne made about her mother and other's in hiding with the family, and because of some of her sexual thoughts. The 50th Anniversary Edition publication contains the entire diary and is the edition used by the Culpepper County Schools. The passage objected to?

"There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!"

 Seriously. Have these people actually read their Old Testament? Or when they say The Bible, do they mean the modern versions of the New Testament with Jesus's words printed in red? One of the most sexually explicit books around is The Bible if anyone took the time to read it.

Another example of parents believing that they can direct the thoughts of their children by limiting their exposure to ideas. Do they think their children have never heard the word vagina? Do not know where babies come from or how by the time they are in 8th grade (the grade this book was assigned)?

A partial list of other books that have been banned in this country include:

To protect the children:

• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman because it talks about the necessity of not following religion blindly which some have seen as anti-religion. Umm, okay. Freedom of speech anyone?
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding because it contains violence, language, and struggle for good and evil and forces us to examine human nature and its faults. Again. 1st Amendment, and why exactly is self-reflection a bad thing?

Sex:

• Lady Chatterly's Lover by DH Lawrence because of adultery
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald because of sex and language

Religion and Politics:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck actually because it made the growers look bad
• Uncle Tom's Cabin because it was anti-slavery
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift because among other things, it was ultimately anti-colonization

Race and Gender:

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee because of racism, language, and the rape scene although it is really because of Lee's highlighting the racism of her time in order to change it (I read this for the first time at age 7 and had no trouble understanding all the 'complex' issues
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott because some see the one character with a feminist perspective punished by marriage to an older man

Other:

• Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship but is censored because of language, they say.

In a country where the radical right trumpets the Constitution, it's interesting how easily they are able to ignore it.

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Merriam-Webster Dictionary Banned in Menifee, California Schools

Remarkable. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Collegiate Edition, has been banned by the Menifee School District in Menifee, California. Why you say? Evidently, a child discovered a reference to the phrase "oral sex" and his or her parent/s complained according to the Riverside County Press Enterprise. No discussion, no vote, not even any contact with the school board. All copies of the dictionary were pulled off the shelves and:

"A memo from the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction this week called the Merriam-Webster dictionary a respected resource but noted district officials found that "a number of referenced words are age-inappropriate."

Evidently a committee is being formed to review the situation and:

"determine the extent to which the challenged material supports curriculum, the educational appropriateness of the material and its suitability to the age level of the students," according to school district policy." 

A number of years ago, the State of Washington introduced a new, and mandatory, AIDS curriculum at the middle-school level. Parents could waive the participation of their children, but in order to do so, the parent/s were required to review the materials first. Being new in town and also eager to see how the subject was to be handled, I attended the parent session. It was conducted just as it would be taught to our children and I thought, very well done. After the class, we were divided into small discussion groups and I had my first experience of small-town small-mindedness and bigotry. This is not to say that this mind-set would not have existed in the big city from which we had come, but if so, I had not yet experienced it directly.

I was appalled to discover how many parents truly believed that if their children did not know something existed, then their was no danger of their being affected by it. If children did not know that such a thing as homosexuality existed, then, there was no risk that they would ever engage in homosexual behavior (these were people who could not conceive of homosexuality as a state of being rather than a behavior). If children did not know about sexuality, then they would not be sexual. If they were taught about birth control, then that was permission to engage in sexual activity. When I made a comment about critical thinking--along the lines of wanting my children to have as much information as possible so that they could think critically and make up their own minds about things, one of the mothers said "I don't want my children to think critically. We tell them what to think and what to believe." And all the other parents nodded and agreed. I laughed, thinking they were joking. But they were not.

This decision in Menifee has gotten little attention and upon learning about it, very few parents objected. Dictionaries are used to look things up, meaning that if a child has not first heard the word or phrase, it is not likely they would go to the dictionary to find its meaning, and, with all the computers available in the schools (and most homes), a simple search would provide a much more in-depth response (with images) and faster than any dictionary could provide.

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