I Had This In A Post Earlier....

GOOD NEWS! The ban had already been rescinded, and Wonkette wrote about it at the time!

Thanks for unfucking the timeline, @robynelyse! https://t.co/JSrXa2sz1n

— Master Rebecca Schoenkopf, Wonkette Editrix, King (@commiegirl1) September 27, 2022

...and removed it because the tweet had been deleted. The tweet I had was from The Guardian about this book banning story. The tweet was deleted because this was very old news. Like, a year old:

I woke up this morning to a news alert that our @GirlsWhoCode middle-grade book series was banned by some school districts as part of the Mom for Liberty effort to ban books. To be honest, I am so angry I cannot breathe.https://t.co/5rBJkcGQDV

— reshmasaujani (@reshmasaujani) September 24, 2022

Yeah, that's where it started.

Here's what actually happened: In September of 2020, in response to the killing of George Floyd and other issues in the news at the time, teachers in the district put together "a list of books and educational resources for teachers and students to use as the local community, like the rest of the nation, struggled to make sense of the murder of George Floyd and the deep racial and social strife that ensued."

However, the very conservative and very white school board did not like that one bit, and banned all those books and resources and every book in every series associated with those books, and a bunch of other books they didn't like, just to be safe.

Rather than just letting them have their way, angry parents, teachers and students banded together, organized, protested and refused to stop until the school board rescinded the ban a year later.

Wonkette has the relevant links, if you're interested.

One commenter offered a defense for banning a couple of the books on what was called the “Diversity Resource List.” The woman, a parent in the district named Christina Hardesty, said she did not object to benign books, such as “Who is Rosa Parks?” and “Who is Jesse Owens?”, but she did object to others that she believed teach critical race theory and promote socialism and communism.

Another supporter of removing books from the list, Jennifer Hyman, said the books were a “smokescreen” to indoctrinating students in critical race theory. She accused the former superintendent, Michael Snell, of trying to introduce a critical race theory takeover in the district. She urged those listening to “educate themselves about critical race theory” and to be vigilant of “radicals within our ranks.”

The nice thing for those two ladies is that they will never know if any of those books contained any "critical race theory," because they very clearly have absolutely no idea what it even is. It could be muffins, for all they know!

Muffins!  Muffins are...evil?  No, let's not start that.

Anyway, this, to me, is the interesting bit:

Unfortunately, there are still a whole lot of districts on the PEN America list that are still banning books, and we've still got Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups mobilizing across the country to get books they dislike banned in schools and libraries. If we're going to defeat those bans the way they did in the Central York school district, then we're going to have to be just as adamant, just as outraged and just as persistent as they are.

But:  are they?  I don't mean PEN is lying; I just mean PEN openly relied on news stories to list the number of book bans per state.  And if those book bans ended shortly after they began, isn't that a good thing that should also be reported?  Or should we assume darkness has fallen across the entire country (except for those states where PEN lists no bans, because PEN has no news reports to report on?) and the bans will only be lifted through the concerned efforts of Concerned Twitter?

I mean, as long as we're going to try to be careful about the actual facts....