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Monday, 08 February 2010 16:47
Complain of Gay and ‘Sexually Explicit’ Themes
So much for smart-alecky Easterners turning up their noses at “Okies”: The
Union Public Schools district Board of Education in Oklahoma recently voted to
allow the book “Buster’s Sugartime” to remain on shelves. The book details the
rabbit Buster following around the children of a same-sex couple as they play,
make cookies and make maple syrup.
Only a few days later, on Jan. 29, the Washington Post reported that the
school system in Culpeper County, in rural Northern Virginia, decided to stop
assigning a version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” to students “after a parent
complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual
themes.”
The diary was written while the German-Dutch girl, then 13, was in hiding in
an Amsterdam attic with family members and others from the Nazis because she was
Jewish. The book, which was saved by the people who sheltered the Franks, was
published by her father after the war.
Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with her sister. All
of the people in the attic died except her father. A 1955 play based on the
diary is the most popular staple of high-school theater groups, along with “Our
Town.”
In the years since its publication, it has become the most famous
first-person chronicle of the Holocaust. Historians and literary scholars praise
the book’s honest tone and literary qualities. It has long been considered one
of—if not the—greatest diaries ever written by a girl in her early teens, and is
extremely popular with teen-age readers.
The book is consistently ranked among the major works of the 20th
century.
The school system, however, doesn’t agree. The controversy is over the
unexpurgated “Diary,” which contains passages that her father edited out of the
original edition. An English translation of the “The Diary of Anne Frank, The
Revised Critical Edition” was published in 1995 to near-universal acclaim.
Scholars, educators and historians universally praised the new edition as a
more complete version of Anne’s work and presenting a more complex and nuanced
portrait of the young writer and her cramped milieu. Since its original
publication, it has continually been in print, and was a best-seller on its
release.
While the new version will be available in the school library, teachers are
only to assign the earlier version. The board was responding to one parent’s
complaint. The board has a stated policy of reviewing such complaints.
In this case, “The person came in, and the decision was made that day,”
according to a spokesperson.
“Something that one individual finds controversial or offensive or
objectionable may be really valuable to other learners in that community,”
Angela Maycock of the office for intellectual freedom of the American Library
Association, told the Post.
Commenters on Free Republic would disagree. “It seems likely that someone
decided saw an opportunity to sneak homosexuality into school reading material
and did so,” wrote one.” “Good for the parent,” wrote another.
In 1983, an Alabama textbook committee called for the book’s rejection from
schools. The reason? It was a “real downer.”
Steve Weinstein has been a regular correspondent for the International Herald
Tribune, the Advocate, and is an editor for Edge Media Networks, who have
allowed SFGN reprint rights to this article.
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