Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel reported the banned books list in Orange County. I haven’t read most of them, but several of the banned books that I had read were very surprising to me.
The next post will identify all the books on the list.
Postal wrote:
A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.
The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.
The books run the gamut, from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem “Paradise Lost” to John Grisham’s 1991 New York Times bestseller “The Firm.” John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” made the list, too.
The list also includes popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd and Jodi Picoult, classics like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Jude the Obscure,” and “Madame Bovary,” and award-winning books like “A Thousand Acres,” “Beloved,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
The books that surprised me most were:
PARADISE LOST
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
MADAME BOVARY
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Do you think teenagers will rush to read Milton’s Paradise Lost or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary now that they are banned?
The next post will have the full list.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The state government, by, banning these, classics, are, ensuring that the, future, generations, lacked the, culture, and, by, banning these, books that are, controversial to the, conservatives, the students would be deprived of, the, alternative, perspectives, they would need to be able to, make, sound judgments, and they won’t know how to, vote on the, issues, instead, they will be, voting for, whoever they find to be, appeasing to them, and, the governments, voted out by these, uneducated, adults, wouldn’t rule the country, based off of, what’s in the, best, interests of the, constituencies.
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Are all those commas some sort of code?
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Brave New World is full of sex among children. It always surprised me when people DIDN’T have a cow about it.
Paradise Lost features sex between Adam and Eve; between Satan and his daughter, Sin; and among angels. The angel sex is far, far better, Milton tells us, that human sex could ever be. The references to these are buried in a long and difficult poem, and I doubt any high-school student would ever encounter them.
Madam Bovary deals with adultery.
I never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
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I hope adolescents are lining up to check out Paradise Lost and the other classics on the list.
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Good morning Diane and everyone,
If a high schooler can get through Flaubert, I’ll be astounded! There’s one soporific writer!! I never could get through him without falling asleep!
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Works by Flaubert banned in Orange County!! I wonder when any student last checked him out.
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All those deviants hiding copies of Flaubert in their lockers. LOL.
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Sex among statutory children or sex among biological children?
There is a difference.
Until 1938, there was no statutory classification for children. Before that, there were biological children and young adults who were biologically capable of getting pregnant and having children. And few states punished adults having sex with biological children as young as 7.
The laws that created statutory children due to abuse in factories, coal mines and bordellos didn’t change the fact that childhood ends at adolescence (that may be as early as 9 years old for a few), since legislation doesn’t control our DNA, at least not yet.
“By age 10, many children are showing the first signs of puberty, and their interest in what this means increases. Middle School/Junior High. At this time, children become increasingly aware of their own sexual feelings that naturally go along with puberty. Children may start masturbating for the sexual feelings.” — University of Washington
And there is no global standard for when a child becomes a statutory child.
In the Philippines ,the youngest statutory laws in the world, says at 12, a child becomes an adult.
Even in the United States, statutory laws differ by state.
In California, a young adult is considered a child until they reach 18 (with one of the toughest statutory laws in the country). In some states, that age is 16. Click the link and look at Alabama.
The third column is revealing: Age differential between the victim and defendant ( if the victim is above minimum age)
https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/statutory-rape-guide-state-laws-reporting-requirements-1
Then there are child marriage laws by state and country.
“In most U.S. states, the minimum marriage age for minors that have parental consent ranges from 12 to 17 years old.”
Some extreme cases of child marriage in the U.S. are:
“In 2010 in Idaho, a 65-year-old man married a 17-year-old girl
In Alabama, a 74-year-old man married a 14-year-old girl
In Tennessee, three 10-year-old girls married men ages 24, 25, and 31, respectively.
The youngest boy to marry was an 11-year-old who married a 27-year-old woman in Tennessee in 2006”
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/child-marriage-laws-by-state
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Biological children. In the book Brave New World, very young children (children of six or seven) are encouraged to spend their time in sexual play with one another, and adults are encouraged to be promiscuous. A typical college student has as many as 400 partners.
I thought most people had read this book and would know this stuff from it. Huxley envisions a dramatically different world in which people do pleasure for its own sake, starting at a very early age. In fact, pleasure is used as a distraction to keep them happily apolitical.
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Somehow lots and lots of people read this book in high school without becoming weirdos.
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I thought that everyone who is well educated had read this book at some point and would know this stuff.
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The state did not ban these books. The book decisions are by the local community input to school boards.
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The state should ban the banning of books.
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Some states have!
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Repugnicans are the “Freedom” party. Their freedom to control your reproduction, whom you take as a partner, what you can read, and so on.
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DerpSlantis, however, created the environment in which these venal small-minded followers of Vera Carp feel emboldened to foist their ignorant prejudices upon everyone in their community.
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Thank you David. Yours is the most succinct and relevant response to all of this. The purported 11 twits who have jumped in to further Gov DeSantis reactionary agenda should never be allowed to give their input to educational matters.
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The list is just bizarre.
The musical “The Bridges of Madison County” by Jason Robert Brown is banned but the novel by Robert James Waller is not. Generally, scripts and scores are not available in school libraries. I also don’t know of a commercially available production video. In any case, the content of the book is far more provocative than the stage depiction- and both deal with the same themes.
A study guide of “The Westing Game” by Beatrice Davis is banned, but the novel by Ellen Raskin is not. Like the musical above, the study guide’s content is pulled from the book- but the source material remains.
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Skat115,
That IS bizarre!
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These excellent points you make (you are an extremely attentive reader) are probably artifacts of how the list was compiled. It probably resulted from a couple backward, fundamentalist parents visiting the school library with their smartphones in their hands. So, something made their list if it happened to be in the library. That’s my guess.
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