All posts tagged "Banned Books"

A cop's decision to sport a body camera and search a Massachusetts middle school for a book has raised serious concerns among civil liberties experts, a new report shows.

The Berkshire Eagle reported Wednesday on mounting fears after the Great Barrington plainclothes police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.

“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told the local news outlet. "What are we doing?”...

Toni Morrison’s unflinching narrative of child abuse, a story of six transgender teens, and a Nobel Prize winner’s autobiographical account of surviving the Holocaust: a Philadelphia school board president chose to be sworn in on these often-banned books instead of the Bible.

Central Bucks president Karen Smith’s oath went viral Tuesday as tens of thousands of people celebrated her stance against local GOP board members who tried to ban “sexualized content,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

“The Bible doesn’t hold significant meaning for me,” Smith told the news outlet. “The banned books, they do mean something to me.” ...

A Florida Republican legislator is publicly warning one of the state’s largest public libraries that it risks losing government funding over its defiant act of issuing library cards proclaiming, “I read banned books.”

The Broward County Library has begun making the cards optionally available to its more than 1 million cardholders as part of its pushback against efforts by to ban and restrict books. The cards include the library’s logo and a picture of flames, according to a report today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

State Rep. Chip LaMarca (R-Lighthouse Point) criticized the library and warned that it could produce what the newspaper termed “prompt retaliation,” the report said: "'I don’t want to see Broward County (penalized) for a political stunt, which is what it is’ LaMarca said Tuesday in a phone interview.” ...