In the wake of complaints from one Wesley Scroggins, a professor of management at Missouri State University and the father of several home-schooled children, the school board of Republic, Missouri, has unanimously voted to ban Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse Five and another novel on the grounds that they advocate principles contrary to the Bible’s teachings.
The second novel banned was Sarah Ockler‘s Twenty Boy Summer.
As the Christian Science Monitor points out, “Somewhere Kurt Vonnegut is laughing.” Here is a quote from Vonnegut, taken from the essay collection A Man Without a Country :
”And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
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