Tag Archives: Beloved

“Holocaust graphic novel ‘Maus’ banned in Tennessee county schools over nudity and profanity”—Washington Post

“Banned: Books on race and sexuality are disappearing from Texas schools in record numbers”—NBC NEWS

“Missouri school district bans Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’”—TODAY

“Mom Who Tried to Ban Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ Is Now a GOP Star”—Vice

“Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S”—New York Times

IRATE MOTHER STORMS LOCAL SCHOOL BOARD TO BAN THE BIBLE

By Common Sense

February 2, 2022

At the School Board meeting in Anywhere, USA, a White overbearing mother hijacked the meeting to protest her seventeen-year-old being assigned the Bible to read in his AP (Advanced Placement) literature class.  According to America’s White Mom, her son’s assignment was to read the Bible from the beginning to the end and write a 500-word paper on why this time-honored book should be considered inspirational, educational and, in some quarters, inerrant. Mrs. White Mom came to the school board meeting to get the Bible banned for its “content,” when her son, said he had “night terrors after reading the Bible one evening”. 

“When my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk,” [sic] America’s White Mom said in the Board meeting. “It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine. My baby-boy didn’t get very far in his reading before he encountered stories of extreme cruelty, brutality, gang rape, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and the brutal slaughter of women, so much so, it caused him to vomit all night. The first passage that almost destroyed my innocent Sweetpea was from Judges 19:22-29 about two men traveling on a business trip along with a concubine, when they were invited to stay at the home of a stranger.  As the story unfolds, the men of the town demanded to rape the two male guests, but the owner of the house thought that would be inhospitable so his guest offered the concubine to them instead. Listen to this:

‘So, the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight.

‘When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.

‘When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel.’”

“Whoever is captured will be thrust through;

    all who are caught will fall by the sword.

Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces

Before their eyes;

Their houses will be plundered

And their wives ravished.”

This reporter noticed that everyone was stunned into such silence that you could hear a pin drop in the room.  The Board members began to squirm as the Head of the Board finally asked the others in the room: “Aren’t we all Christians in this here town, and don’t we all have Bibles in our homes—maybe multiple copies of them? Not that we read them as much as we should, of course (ha, ha, ha), but that is neither here nor there. The point of the Bible is to introduce our kids to the Little Baby Jesus. . . to show them that the Christian God is love, and the only way to eternal salvation.  That’s the main point of the Bible. Just ignore that other stuff America’s White Mom is quoting, which I don’t remember from my reading of the Bible back in the day.  Are you sure your son was reading the Bible and not the Koran, which we banned ten years ago, by the way, for its Shariah law, Moslem-pushing hatred against Christians, and its brutal violence?  I don’t think we even have a copy of the Koran in our city library, that’s what a great job we did in getting it banned.”

“Oh really,” replied agitated White Mom. “Well, my son can certainly tell you all about it if you speak to him. Do you know what he said to me?  He said the passages in the Bible he had read were ‘disgusting and gross’. It was hard for him to handle, and he almost gave up on his reading assignment right then and there, especially after reading Deuteronomy 25:11-12:

‘When two men are fighting and the wife of one of them intervenes to drag her husband clear of his opponent, if she puts out her hand and catches hold of the man by his privates, you must cut off her hand and show her no mercy.’

“Auugh, what the hell is that? My little guy has been shielding his wee-wee and sack with his hands ever since reading that passage. And another thing (this really hurt his heart), my nephew, who my son loves very much, has Down Syndrome, and when my impressionable boy read Leviticus 21:18-19, he threw the Bible across the room in total disgust:

‘The Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron (the High Priest): ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary.’”

“Now, now America’s White Mom,” exclaimed the Head of the Board.  “You really must calm down. Tell the boy to give the Bible another try.  How bad could the Holy Bible be if every Christian church around the world preaches from it and encourages studying it on a consistent basis?  Do you know what type of headache it will cause us if we ban the Holy Bible?  We’ll be run out of town on a rail.  Surely, you can ignore the brutality of our nation’s most sacred book for the higher purpose of what it’s trying to teach us.  It’s about God’s love.  It’s about caring for each other.  It’s about doing the right thing at all times.”

“Nope—no can do,” replied America’s White Mom.  “After reading the verse sanctioning cannibalism in Jeremiah 19:9, my boy ran away from home still holding his hands over his gonads, and I haven’t seen him since.  He sent me a text which said if we ban the Bible, maybe he’ll think about coming home, but as a kid it just didn’t seem safe to stay around Bible-reading adults anymore, and he says that there are scores more horrifying passages in the Bible that support his decision”:

“I [God] will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them.”

Given the evidence that America’s White Mom presented, the school board in Anywhere, USA had no choice but to ban the Bible for its wanton cruelty and potential pollution of young minds.

ELEANOR’S SELAH ABOUT BOOK BANNING

In 2013, a White suburban, Christian mother, and GOP activist (Laura Murphy) fought to get Toni Morrison’s Beloved removed from her senior-level high school son’s AP class in the largest school system in Virginia (the school system in which my kids attended) on the grounds that it gave him “night terrors” because it was so explicit in nature (brutality and rape committed against the slaves by their “masters,” and bestiality committed by the slaves who had been reduced to beasts by the slave owners’ treatment of them).  Some of the dialogue used in my satire of “banning the Bible” were the actual words of cross-wearing Laura Murphy and her son Brett, which were found in print and in the Virginia Republican Governor’s ads in 2021 that handed the election to Republican Gov. Youngkin because it scared the shit out of Virginia’s White voting moms. (BTW: It was very obvious by the strategic placement of the cross on Ms. Murphy’s neck that Gov. Youngkin’s campaign ad featuring her was completely, shamelessly, and totally directed to White, Christian moms of Virginia who swallowed the fear she was peddling hook, line, and sinker.)

Upon taking office, Gov. Youngkin of Virginia immediately set up a “hot-tip line” for Virginians to call if they see, hear, or even suspect teachers teaching CRT (Critical Race Theory) which has never been taught in Virginia (it’s an academic theory).  CRT is being used as a bogey-man to squelch teaching the truth about the negative effects that slavery, the Jim Crow era, and structural racism have on African-Americans today.  

BEFORE WE BAN ANYMORE BOOKS LET’S CHAT ABOUT SOME FACTS….

Beloved, by Toni Morrison is based on the true story of a Black slave woman, Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her husband, Robert, and their children. Even though it was the end of the Civil War, they were recaptured and were going to be returned to their owners, but Margaret who had been systematically raped and brutalized for years by her slave holders feared that the same would befall her daughter.  So, she slit her throat and actually tried to kill her other three kids but failed. The book is brutal, terrifying, and heartbreaking. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley has noted the graphic violence in Beloved and has said: “Harriet Beecher Stowe was accused in her time of exaggerating the cruelties in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and she replied that in fact she whitewashed events to render them publishable. Morrison is her heir, in the sense that she dares to discuss and publish more (though certainly not all) of the truth.” 

Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, (most recently unanimously banned by 10 school board members in McMinn county, Tennessee as an 8^th grade reading selection) is a graphic novel based on true stories about Spiegelman’s Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland, their Nazi concentration camp horrors, his mother’s subsequent suicide, featuring interviews with his father about his dad’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. Maus was banned from the eighth-grade curriculum in a county in Tennessee, due to parental concerns about eight curse words, the sketch of a nude woman with the head of a mouse and body of a human (the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, the English are fish, the French are frogs, and the Swedes are deer), an aunt who poisons herself and her kids (mice) to help them escape capture by the Gestapo so that they won’t die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

Maus won the Pulitzer Prize for a graphic novel in 1992 (to date, the only graphic novel to do so), and Maus has been used for years to help teenagers wrap their heads around the evil of what can happen when man ignores his humanity.

Now here’s the thing:  I am and always have been an over-bearing Christian mother (may God forgive me).  The term “Helicopter Mom” doesn’t even begin to describe my parenting—try “Velcro Mom” or even yet: “Super Glue Mom”.  (My kids say I’m getting better with age—one can only hope.)  Would I have concerns if my 8^th grader was assigned Maus and my 12^th grader was assigned Beloved to read as part of their advanced and college-level English classes?  Honestly? Yes!  

Both books are horrifying in the description of the depth of cruelty that humans are capable of, and I would be afraid I had coddled my children much too much for them to handle such reality in print or any medium for that matter.  Would I encourage the banning of the books for my kids?  I’ve thought long and hard about this: No!  (Unless my kids were extremely fragile and mentally unstable, then that’s an entirely different discussion and course of action.)  As a parent, I would read the books along with my children (gulp!), have very embarrassingly open discussions about the “offensive parts” while constantly pointing toward the higher purposes and truth of both books, and I’d help them navigate the world of the past which could become their future if the history is never learned.  In the words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana,“Those who don’t know history [or ignore history=my words] are destined to repeat it.”

Would it be emotionally difficult and very embarrassing?  Hell, yes!  It would probably be the hardest parenting I’d ever do because of the discomfort of it all—but these types of books are meant to make the reader feel deep, deep discomfort and pain. They are meant to hurt. Why?  So that each new generation will dig deeper into their souls to find the solutions to keep humans from slip-sliding away into the darkness of man’s inhumanity to man.  That each new generation will learn that they too are capable of doing great harm if they don’t protect Truth.  Nothing offensive in Maus and Beloved (or other great literature like it) can even begin to come close to the reality of the history of the Holocaust and American Slavery.  Man’s inhumanity to man has happened in the past, is still happening all over the globe, and we see evidence of it rearing its Satanic head in America during our present day.  I would hope that because my kids had learned about the past, they’d be able to protect the future. Truth, via books and all the arts, will be our children’s best weapons to guard against and defeat the evil that rears its demonic head long after their parents are dead and gone*.

*In the past several years, the vehement complaints of White people who tour plantations have greatly increased when the history of the plantation’s slavery is presented during the tours.  Even while standing in front of the slave houses or the markers of their graves, the visitors get disgusted and proclaim: “We are on vacation! We came here to be entertained—not to be grossed out!”

*Since the rise of Trump Republicanism, more and more school districts are trying to squelch not only the teachings about the truth of slavery and anti-semitism, but the books about LGBTQIA+ youth (All Boys Aren’t Blue has been targeted for removal from schools and libraries in at least 14 states). And don’t even get me started about the continued erasure of the abuse and murder of millions of Native Americans from our textbooks. The book First Nations of North America: Plains Indians is on a list to be banned in Tennessee’s Williamson County because it “paints White people in a negative light.”

“As the New York Times reported, the relentless flood of proposed book bans is dizzying in both scale and overtly political animus. The Daily Beast reported this week how a 10th grade English class in North Carolina is no longer allowed to read the acclaimed book Dear Martin, about a teen’s experience of racial profiling, after one parent complained that it contained profanity.”—Tim Timman, DAILY BEAST

Eleanor Tomczyk is an author and a satirist who is an award-winning voice-over performer.  In 2011, she created the blog, “How the Hell Did I End Up Here” which features mostly satirical posts that have thousands of readers around the world—although she was recently banned in Pakistan (for real!).  Tomczyk’s three books were featured in a recent book festival: “Monsters’ Throwdown,” “Fleeing Oz,” and “The Fetus Chronicles—Podcasts to my Miseducated Self.”  Currently in her 70s and living life like it is freakin’ golden, she is a consummate storyteller and much sought-after motivational speaker.  If you don’t believe me, just ask her!

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