Book banning should be banned.

Jezebel.com has a post up today about a mother’s failed attempt at book banning in her child’s school library at Thiesen Middle School in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.  She attempted to have the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series removed, as well as Get Well Soon by Julie Halpern, What My Mother Doesn’t Know and One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, both by Sonya Sones.

I found it to be particularly interesting because I’m currently in an honors course on banned books.  Just last week, we began discussion on Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Our preliminary discussion of the book included reference to its role in the Supreme Court case, Island Trees School District v. Pico.  A teacher in the school district decided to teach Slaughterhouse-Five.  One of the girls in his class told her mother that the book had some objectionable content, one thing led to another, and soon a janitor was made to burn copies of the book in the school furnace.  The decision was challenged by many of the students, and a few of them (including Pico) took the school district to court.  Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'”