Campaigns that started with criticizing school board members and librarians have now turned their attention to tech companies such as OverDrive and Epic that have operated for years without drawing much controversy.
E-reader apps that became a lifeline for students during the pandemic are now in the crossfire of a culture war raging over books in schools and public libraries.
In several states, apps and the companies that run them have been targeted by conservative parents who have pushed schools and public libraries to shut down their digital programs, which let users download and read books on their smartphones, tablets or laptops.
Some parents want the apps banned for their children, or even for all students. And they’re getting results.
A school superintendent in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, pulled his system’s e-reader offline for a week last month, cutting access for 40,000 students, after a parent searched the Epic library available on her kindergartener’s laptop and found books supporting gay pride.
In a rural county northwest of Austin, Texas, county officials cut off access to the OverDrive digital library that local residents had used for a decade to find books to read for pleasure, prompting a federal lawsuit against the county.
No longer is this about the rights of students to access books. It’s now about the rights of private businesses to sell books. Anderson suggests this is a new avenue for parents to fight.
“We are in a major fight. Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools,” he said.
Holy shit this is a BIG FUCKING WARNING SIGN. Challenges to school and public libraries aren’t cool obviously, but they’re not unusual and we have a framework for handling them. This is something new and alarming in a whole new way
Republican “free speech” y'all and don’t you forget it.
This is a direct challenge to the freedom of the press and if it isn’t struck down at the first hurdle we need to make sure it never sees the second one.
On the miniscule off-chance that anyone who sees my reblog might be thinking “oh, it’s just queer books that they’re trying to ban” - A Court of Mist and Fury is a het romance. It is a het romance containing het sex scenes, written by a straight white woman.
People have been warning all along that the right-wing thought police were never going to stop with queer lit or ‘woke’ lit, and that every time they got an inch they were going to take a mile until they’d banned absolutely everything that didn’t conform to their strict right wing fundamentalist Christian views. If you were waiting for proof of that, here it is.
I have been threatening to write a big thing about my time as a Southern Baptist for ages, and here it is. I was raised Southern Baptist, but I was super active in it from the ages of about 13 to 17. Enclosed is a very long look at what it was like.
Sabine’s description is accurate and interesting, if you’d like to learn more about being a teenager in a conservative Evangelical Christian tradition.
My own experience was similar, though my church was “nondenominational,” i.e. Southern Baptist but without the hierarchical commitments. Probably the biggest difference in my own experience was with testimonies about sex; almost everyone in my church was homeschooled and thus separated even further from cultural norms, and confessing sex would be done obliquely or not at all. (My teenage sex ed didn’t come from church camp; it came from erotic fanfic on Usenet and AOL.)
I’m also fascinated by the relatively broad roles for women that Sabine describes. Women in my church could not be ministers, elders, deacons, or teachers, unless they were teaching children or an all-women’s group. For a few years, my family even went to a different church where women were literally not supposed to speak during the church service. So the idea of a woman going to seminary for a career in ministry was not even on my radar.
(Years later, when I did go to a seminary — a liberal Ivy one — people from that Evangelical world responded to the news by saying, “Oh my. I’ll sure pray for you!”)
I hate when customers hand out those stupid and ugly religious pamphlets that are made to look like money because at first glance I am so excited to have money for food or medicine, but the back just has a quote and then followed by “this is more valuable than money”. It is disgusting and insulting to give these “tips” to people, especially the poor, and expect a thank you as if you have saved their life.
i implore anyone reading this to reblog this actually <3
If you haven’t met one of those fake panflets here is how they look, more or less:
