Book bans oppose Jesuit values

One book that was rejected was a high school statistics textbook that discussed racial profiling in policing, discrimination of magnet school admission and mentioned that the proportion of white police officers in the New York Police Department did not match up when compared to the racial makeup of New York City.

It’s clear that this statistics textbook was simply using real-world statistics in order to teach the subject. The banning of these textbooks is an inappropriate overreaction.

This isn’t only a problem in Florida. In Wisconsin, Laurie Kontney, a former Marquette professor, aided in the removal of a book from the Muskego Norway School District curriculum. The book, “When the Emperor was Divine,” covers the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. Kontney claimed that the ideas of the book didn’t have a place in an

Students have a right to learn and teachers have a duty to educate about the past no matter how unpleasant it may be. Just because something makes you uncomfortable does not mean that it is immoral.

Stories by writers, such as Mark Twain, William Shakespeare and George Orwell have been deemed to contain objectionable content inappropriate for the classroom. For example, the “Twelfth Night” was banned in Merrimack, New Hampshire for “encouraging homosexuality.” The “homosexuality” in question is an expression of gender in a comedic tone. In the play the heroine, “Viola,” dresses as a pageboy. Consequently, the character Olivia unknowingly falls in love with Viola as her pageboy alter ego, which is the basis for its exclusion from the curriculum.

The play isn’t even explicitly queer. If a Shakespeare play that is not explicitly queer, aside from the gender-bending storyline, is too much then what does that say for books which actually represent queer stories? Queer stories are often overwhelmingly labeled as too sexual. Students who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community deserve to be represented in their curriculum. This kind of banning sends the message that some stories don’t deserve to be told.

Banning books is not a new practice in the United States. It’s been around since the beginning of the country. During the early 19th century, the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was banned for expressing anti-slavery sentiments. The book exposed the true horrors of slavery and was praised by abolitionists. Publicly, slaveholders burned and banned the book. Book banning has always been a means to censor speech and is and will