DENVER - Members of the Jefferson County School Board have proposed a new “board committee for curriculum review” with a stated mission to “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” According to the board’s proposal, “Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.” The review committee would also be tasked with informing the school board of “objectionable materials.”
ACLU of Colorado Executive Director Nathan Woodliff-Stanley issued the following statement:
“The ACLU of Colorado is watching with a concerned eye attempts by Jefferson County School District officials to institute an apparently ideologically-motivated review of the district’s history curriculum.
“State-funded school curriculum should promote academic integrity, not ideological agendas. A committee that polices educational materials for insufficient devotion to patriotism or a lack of respect for authority runs the real danger of substituting propaganda for education.
“It’s troublesome, especially during a week in which the ACLU and anti-censorship advocates across the country recognize Banned Books Week, that the curriculum review committee would be charged with identifying and referring so-called “objectionable materials” to the school board. “Objectionable” is a standard that lends itself to censorship by empowering a small few to judge content based on their own personal or religious beliefs.
“The ACLU of Colorado offers its support to the students, teachers, and parents who have exercised their right to peacefully protest the proposal. It’s ironic that an attempt to downplay examples of social change being accomplished through civil disobedience has spurred a community-wide crash course in just how important it is to be able to speak out and question authority in a just and democratic society.”
For an infographic of banned books throughout history: https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/infographic-banned-books-week
Read Fighting for Captain Underpants, a new blog about censorship in recognition of Banned Book Week: https://aclu-co.org/blog/fighting-captain-underpants/
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(From the ACLU Blog of Rights)
"Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants." "Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman." "Captain Underpants and the Farty Fight for Free Speech." Okay fine, I made up the last one.
The silly titles of the "Captain Underpants" series lined our bookshelf at home, thanks to my younger brother. As his wiser and worldlier older sister, I wanted nothing to do with such absurdity. It seems some older people, however, have taken greater offense to Dav Pilkey's children's books, their paranoia almost more farcical than the titles themselves.
For the past two years, "Captain Underpants" was the book most frequently sought to be censored or banned, according to the American Library Association (ALA). Complaints have included "offensive language, unsuited for age group, [and] violence." Aside from potty jokes, the books contain no inappropriate language. The extent of violence includes a ping-pong serve-o-matic that shoots out eggs instead of balls, landing on everybody's head.
Horrific, really.
The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reported 307 challenges to books in 2013, though it estimates that 70 to 80 percent of challenges are never reported. Other books on the top 10 most challenged list for the past year include popular reads like Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games."
INFOGRAPHIC: Which of your favorite books have been banned?
Banned Books Week is an effort the national book community has organized since 1982 to draw attention to the problem of censorship in schools, bookstores, and libraries. The week celebrates so-deemed "harmful" books, which paternalistic forces have tried, sometimes successfully, to take off the shelves. More importantly, it raises awareness about how dangerous it is for our country to ban books in the first place.
Despite the protections of the First Amendment, our right to think, record, and spread our ideas has been consistently challenged since our country's founding.
Print and visual media have been censored many times to the detriment of our democracy – too often because the powerful feared that their comfortable status quo was under threat. Beginning in the 1830s until the end of the Civil War, for example, the U.S. postmaster general refused to carry abolitionist pamphlets to the South. During the Red Scare, filmmakers were jailed for alleged ties to communism. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration actually passed a law to end the production ofBraille copies of Playboy — because heaven forbid the visually impaired be corrupted through their fingers.
Today, teachers and librarians remain under a barrage of paranoid adults attempting to remove material from school curricula and bookshelves. Other censorship advocates have turned to the Internet as their new frontier. And in an age of surveillance, many writers are increasingly engaging in self-censorship to protect themselves from a snooping government.
Since its inception in 1920, the ACLU has been at the forefront of the fight against censorship, winning many important victories for free speech along the way. Today we are defending reporters' right to observe and write about lethal executions, fighting for students to exercise their First Amendment rights, and advising a government whistleblower who has spurred an unprecedented debate on the need for government reform.
Banned Books Week celebrates these and other efforts to defend our right to think and learn about whatever we want, no matter how unorthodox or unpopular. Whether about an underpants hero, a troubled youth, or a civil rights leader, information and our unfettered access to it is critical for free thought and the health of our democracy.
Find your local Banned Books Week event here, and keep on fighting the farty fight.
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Monday, September 22, 2014 - 2:11pmShow featured image
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This editorial by our Executive Director appeared in Sunday's Denver Post
Colorado's anti-abortion extremists have a clear goal: They want to ban all abortions in all circumstances, even in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman's life is in danger.
Twice, in 2008 and 2010, they gathered enough signatures for Colorado ballot initiatives that would have defined a fetus, or even a fertilized egg, as a legal person, subjecting women and their doctors to criminal liability and banning all abortion. The attempted 2010 amendment, in fact, was very explicit with regard to forcing women who are raped to bear the children of their rapists.
When Colorado voters rejected this extreme agenda both times by wide margins, fetal-personhood proponents rethought their strategy. This time around, they have focused their pitch to voters on the genuinely tragic case of a woman whose pregnancy was ended by a drunken driver days before she was due to give birth. Because she had not yet given birth, the accident could not be treated as a homicide.
That was in 2012. The Colorado legislature responded thoughtfully, and has since passed laws that provide strong criminal and civil penalties for unlawful termination of a pregnancy through criminal or negligent acts, including drunken driving.
You might think Personhood USA and the proponents of Amendment 67 supported that legislation, but they did not. They opposed it because it protected pregnant women without doing what they really wanted, which was to define a fetus as a legal person and ban all abortion in the process.
Under Amendment 67, every place that the word "person" or "child" occurs anywhere in the Colorado Criminal Code, it "must" be interpreted to include "unborn human beings." The phrase "unborn human beings" has no established legal or medical definition, so it would apply without limitation to all stages of pregnancy, all the way back to a fertilized egg.
With this alteration to the criminal code, women and their doctors could be jailed for participating in an abortion at any stage of pregnancy, and women who suffer a miscarriage could very well be investigated to determine if they were culpable and criminally liable for manslaughter.
The cascade of potential consequences from defining a fetus, zygote, fertilized egg or frozen embryo as a legal person is mindboggling. It would allow the government and courts to violate the sanctity of doctor/patient privacy and allow government access to women's private medical records. It would prevent couples who want to have children from having them through in-vitro fertilization. It would ban many forms of contraception, resulting in more unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions. It would prevent women from receiving treatments for cancer or other diseases that might affect a known or possible pregnancy.
Family planning and privacy rights and are crucial to the dignity and freedom of women and their families. Neither the government nor religious crusaders should be allowed to intervene and take control of difficult, personal decisions best left to a woman and her doctor. Amendment 67 goes far beyond what it appears to be at first glance, threatening basic rights and opening a legal Pandora's box that would be very hard to close, because it would be written into the Colorado Constitution.
Learn more about Amendment 67 here.
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Monday, September 22, 2014 - 9:49amShow featured image
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