Saturday, January 30, 2010

Culpeper County, VA meet West Bend, WI

There is at least one loon and one incompetent school administrator in Culpeper County, Virginia.

That is the only way to look at it when they ban Anne Frank's diary:
Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.

The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.

I bet that some folks are already standing outside the West Bend library again with torches in hand.

3 comments:

  1. I haven't read the "new version"...or perhaps the "original version"...but in my opinion the passages should never have been taken out in the first place. What do people have against the an accurate protrayal of history? Shame on them for editing Miss Anne's words to make themselves feel more comfortable.

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  2. Seems to me a lot of the book banners are the kind of people who got Anne Frank and her family into this predicament in the first place.

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