Tag Archives: censorship

A public school board in Missouri has banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because it “teaches ideas that are contrary to the Bible.” This action came after a protracted complaint campaign by local university “professor” Wesley Scroggins. Shortly before 9 p.m. Monday, the school board voted 4-0 — three members were absent — to keep Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak,” …

After weeks of demonstrations, yesterday Catholic protesters in France destroyed NYC artist Andres Serrano’s classic and controversial Piss Christ. The UK Guardian reports: The work has previously been shown without incident in France, but for the past two weeks Catholic groups have campaigned against it, culminating in hundreds of people marching through Avignon on Saturday in protest. Just after 11am …

Today NOM’s blog links to a story on the anti-gay Life Site News, which complains that YouTube has yanked the video of last week’s Brown University demonstration by the red-caped loons of the Society for Defense of Tradition. Days after the videotaped incident was posted on YouTube, the video sharing website pulled down the footage, leaving a message stating: “This …

JMG reader Mark S. King reports that Walmart’s website refused his review of the It Gets Better book until he removed the word “gay.” King, who contributed to the book with his openly gay brother, writes us: “My submission was nixed because I used the word ‘gay,’ which the site explained was ‘profanity.’ I felt properly chastised and removed the …

Yesterday a group of students at Harding University in Arkansas launched an online zine meant to “give voice to the experiences of gay and lesbians” on campus, but the school immediately blocked the site from campus by listing it on its porn filter. Read the students’ stirring manifesto, The State Of The Gay. RELATED: Harding alum and JMG reader Brett …

“This is a learning moment for everybody.”

My click-tracker tells me that over 1700 of you hit the Harps contact page link I posted at the beginning of the day. It’s a tiny victory to be sure, but it’s also a message to all the nation’s retailers. Nice work, everybody. UPDATE: Appreciative positive reinforcement would be a nice thing for us to do.

Last night Twitter user JennHudd tweeted out this photo she took at Harps, a grocery store in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Apparently US Weekly’s cover shot of Elton John, his partner, and baby is just too shocking for children. Harps has over 60 locations in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Call their home office at 877-772-8193 or use their contact form if …

New York City’s Museum of Modern Art has acquired the video created by late gay artist David Wojnarowicz, which was pulled by the Smithsonian after an outcry from the GOP and the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. The museum acquired both the original 13-minute version of the video, titled “A Fire in My Belly,” and a separate 7-minute excerpt made by …

The leaders of Kenya’s evangelical movement are pressuring the national museum to remove a world-famous collection of bones which conclusively depict the evolution of apes to humans. The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Dr Leakey’s team in 1984 at Nariokotome, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The …

“Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn’t hardly notice the other hipsters. Hipsters would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any hipster in that country. Strange hipsters would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. …

“In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay …

“It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ are rarely …

“If there are no common standards of decency, there is no moral community, and where there is no moral community, there is no country. If we cannot agree on what is beautiful, moral and decent, are we really ‘one nation, under God, indivisible’ anymore? [WaPo art critic] Gopnik and the Post have put critics of the gallery’s sex show on …

“The Battle of the Smithsonian is more than a Ben Stiller movie–it’s reality for conservatives on Capitol Hill, who are disgusted by the latest exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Just across the street from FRC headquarters, a month-old display called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” is causing quite an uproar for a series of images that range …

More Christianist bullshit about the gay video exhibit that I reported on yesterday. (Via – Truth Wins Out)

The Catholic League, that one-guy-with-a-computer outfit headed by anti-gay nutjob Bill Donohue, has successfully pressured the Smithsonian into removing an AIDS-themed video exhibit by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz. Because for eleven seconds, ants can be seen crawling on a crucifix. The Smithsonian acted after incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner and incoming GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor …

This is Morality In Media’s annual White Ribbon Against Pornography week and they would like you to start demanding that the police enforce all those laws about folks legally purchasing the legally-made smut featuring legally consenting adults. “The reason we have continued to promote the campaign is because people all across the country find it to be a convenient way …