Author Todd Parr has responded with the video below (after the jump) to the banning of his The Family Book by an Illinois school board. They banned the book after some parents complained about a page that says, “Some families have two moms or two dads.” Todd Parr is awesome.
I was focused on Blogging for LGBT Families Day all last week (and I encourage you to go read everyone’s wonderful posts, if you haven’t), but the world of LGBT parenting didn’t stop going on around us. Here are some of the top stories from the past week.
I often write about banned books here, and love the annual Banned Books Week in September. This year, the American Library Association is encouraging anyone celebrating the freedom to read to take part in a Virtual Read-Out on YouTube. School Library Journal has the details: The criteria are simple: create a video that’s less than two minutes
For the fourth time, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, based on the real-life story of two male penguins who raise a chick from an orphaned egg, tops the American Library Association’s (ALA) latest Top Ten list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books. The penguins take over again after slipping to number two
It’s Banned Book Week once again—the American Library Association’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. I’ll refer you back to the piece I wrote for Banned Books Week last year, “Penguins, Rabbits, and Guinea Pigs: In Celebration of Banned Books,” noting that LGBT-themed books continue to be banned or challenged, as a July case
In the same month that the American Library Association came out with its annual list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books, two Florida moms have stepped up their campaign to have libraries put a “Warning: Mature Content” label on any young adult books that refer to illegal acts or contain “inappropriate” content and to segregate
Many of you have been following the story of Scholastic and their request that author Lauren Myracle change the lesbian moms of one character into a mom and a dad. According to the original article on this by School Library Journal, Scholastic would not consider the book for its book fairs unless the change was
“We tried to incubate a rock and that didn’t work,” jokes Justin Richardson, one of the authors of And Tango Makes Three. The truth is, however, that he and his co-author and partner, Peter Parnell, became dads themselves back in February, as the New York Times reports today. Gemma Parnell-Richardson doesn’t have feathers like Tango,
My favorite Banned Book Week quote so far: When we ban a book about a kid on the outside, we’re taking a step toward banning the kid. —Chris Crutcher, whose books have several times landed him on the American Library Association’s list of Top Ten Most Challenged Books (sometimes for homosexual content). He was speaking
I first had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Brannen when her children’s book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding launched early last year. I wrote about the right wing’s first attack on the book, which involved shameless plagiarism of my earlier piece by ultra-conservative writer Brent Bozell III at Town Hall. I then followed the story as the
