Red State Rabble

Steve Abrams, the chairman of the Kansas Board of Education wants to know if he can use state obscenity laws to force schools to remove controversial literature, according to David Klepper, the Kansas City Star Topeka correspondent.

“Some of the things passing for literature in our schools … I wouldn’t want my kids reading it,” he said. “I want to hear what state statute is.”

For more than a year now, students, teachers, parents, and administrators in the Blue Valley School District in suburban Kansas City area have successfully rebuffed the efforts of a small group of right-wing religious fundamentalists to ban from reading lists Pulitzer, PEN, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle award winning literature such as:

• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy -- National Book Award, 1992
• Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver -- PEN fiction prize and Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award, 1991
• The Awakening, Kate Chopin -- The 1899 classic
• The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver --American Library Association, 1988
• Beloved, Toni Morrison -- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, Toni Morrison won the National Book Awards NBF Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Black Boy, Richard Wright -- Named among the top 25 non-fiction works of the century
• Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Meyers -- Coretta Scott King Author Book Award, 1988
• Hot Zone, Richard Preston -- 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou -- Nominated for a National Book Award, 1970
• Lords of Discipline, Pat Conroy -- Conroy won a humanitarian award from the National Education Association for The Water is Wide, 1972
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey -- made into an Academy Award-winning movie
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison -- National Book Critics Circle Award, 1977
• Stotan, Chris Crutcher -- Best Books for Young Adult Readers American Library Association, 1986; Best of the Best in Young Adult Literature, School Library Journal
• This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff -- From a PEN/Faulkner award winner

Of course, PEN, the National Book Critics Circle, The National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize committee don't have anything like the qualifications for judging what is literature and what is not that a vet from Arkansas City has.