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A Thought For Book Banners [1]
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Date: 2023-11-01
I don’t know how old I was when I read the story of Saint Christopher. I think my age was still in the single digits.
It was kind of a guilty pleasure. Saint Christopher was Catholic and I wasn’t. This was the good old days when Catholics and Protestants didn’t mix much, at least not where I grew up.
I liked the story, which is about keeping your priorities straight. But it didn’t make me Catholic, any more than reading about Abraham Lincoln made me a Republican.
I was a voracious reader as a child. My parents sometimes argued about what I should read. But they never restricted it. They even let us read comic books, which were considered bad news in some circles.
I grew up in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. When I went to public school, we gentile kids had two in school vacations, Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur. We had to be in school on those days, but there weren’t enough kids, or enough teachers, for us to have class. We played games and watched movies instead.
We had some of “The Chronicles of Narnia”, in the school library, as well as the Little House books. We had anthologies of fairy tales from various countries, in which, sometimes, Mary, Joseph or Saint Peter put in personal appearances. There was a book about Good King Wenceslaus, the first Christian king of The Czech Republic.
Parents didn’t object. This was the sixties. Parents never objected to what was going on in their kids schools, as long as they weren’t being integrated.
That was then. This is now.
Imagine if a group of parents announced that they didn’t want their children reading “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, because it was Christian. They are atheists, who don’t want their children exposed to religion of any kind. They are Hindus, whose ancestors were ruled by “Christian” England for more than a century. They are Jewish parents who want their kids to stay Jewish.
Imagine that they demand that their local library remove all the Narnia books, all the Little House books, all books about Christmas, Easter or Saint Patrick’s Day, even if they’re secular.
They see these books as Christian propaganda. So, they don’t want their sons and daughters reading “The Little Country Bunny and the Golden Shoes”, which is about an ambitious female rabbit, who becomes an Easter bunny.
How would Moms For Liberty feel, when they heard about people wanting to ban Christian books, or books they thought of as Christian?
I was 12, when I read “Red Planet” by Robert Heinlein, one of his juveniles, about Mars colonists declaring their independence from Earth.
The leader of the newly independent Mars says, “If a girl is old enough to have babies, she’s an adult.”
I was menstruating, presumably old enough to breed. But I knew darn well I wasn’t an adult.
I enjoyed the book. ( I keep hoping the Mars probe will run into a Martian like Heinlein’s Willis.) But I was able to discern that Heinlein was wrong.
Reading about Saint Christopher didn’t make me Catholic. Reading Casper The Friendly Ghost comics didn’t make me a spiritualist. Reading “Red Planet” didn’t make me a mother.
Reading “The Little Country Bunny and the Golden Shoes” will not make a child a Christian.
Reading a book about a blue crayon with a label that says it’s red will not make a child Gay, or transgendered, or anything, except maybe more open minded about other people’s differences.
Someone needs to shake a few of these Moms For Liberty and tell them, it doesn’t matter what their children are reading, as long as they’re reading.
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