Only if they don’t have any money! If they don’t have any money, they should have got some money!
Conventional wisdom has it that it’s the same guy running the Buncombe County GOP Twitter. He, of course, denies it and has retired to his fainting couch to recover from the shock that anyone would accuse him of any wrongdoing.
More on the Asheville abortion clinic closure: This article has a list of the safety violations the clinic supposedly committed. According to the list, the place was held together with string and baling wire. According to people who’ve been there, it was just as clean and professional as any other reputable doctor’s office. :dubious:, indeed.
And then there’s this article from NPR, which contains this gem:
And maybe I’ll start farting unicorns.
Bill Maher on North Carolina and its problems with Art Pope hijacking the entire state.
I like beer cold, my TV loud, and my umemployed people staaaaaaarving.
Guess we’ll have to start making fun of NC along with TX. Glad I didn’t move there. (Although, the Republicans in Ohio aren’t exactly playing nicely. They slid some anit-abortion stuff through in the budget.)
Well, at least there’s some fightback.
Meanwhile, down at the county level:
I’ve never read it – is it a hard read?
Lovely book, but it does mention teh sexxors, and obviously that’d corrupt innocent teenagers.
Speaking of which, the state public indecency law apparently doesn’t include female toplessness. Some municipalities have incorporated female toplessness into their own indecency statutes (I may be using the wrong words here, and if I am, I apologize), but Asheville hasn’t, and for the last two or three years, the Raelians (weird comet hippie cult) have had a topless rally in downtown Asheville. A handful of women take off their shirts, a few hundred men stand around and drool and snap pictures, street preachers faint–it’s all very classy. (Personally I figure they’re in the right, but protesting a law where the law doesn’t exist seems totally absurd to me).
Anyway, some folks in Asheville asked the state to add nipples to the indecency law, and there you go.
Then, of course, the Bible has been pulled from school libraries as well.
“Nowhere is there a Protestant child who does not masturbate.”
– Mark Twain, “Letters from the Earth”
And this summer there were a few of them wandering around downtown when they weren’t having the “official” rally all topless. Coincidentally, this happened during the peak times for tourists to be downtown as well. :dubious:
They’re just desperate for attention and doing anything they can to have people “LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEE!” If we stopped paying attention to them, they would go away. Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen.
I wonder if the Invisible Man ban came about because the county board was upset it wasn’t the H.G. Wells novel? “What? But this man is perfectly visible! This isn’t science fiction! Why is he in a room filled with light bulbs? I’m so confused!”
It’s an easier read than the similarly-themed Notes From Underground, by the highly accessible Fydor Dostoevsky. (Admittedly, my problems with Dostoevsky may relate to translation and his prose may flow beautifully in the original Russian).
But I’ll grant it’s at least not an easy read.
So what, though? Surely the criteria for high school students’ reading material should not be how easy it is.
I read this book in HS. I don’t remember anything salacious. It did have pretty subtle themes and allusions, making it good classroom material.
It also presented complex ideas about race. I could see how that’s a threat.
Fear of a Well-Read Planet?
Huh. Now that I think about it, I might be misremembering a bit of highly ridiculous literary criticism, in which a Communist recruiter takes the protagonist to a cafe where he orders cheesecake, and my HS teacher claimed it was a symbolic offer of white women to the protagonist. I pretty much openly mocked her for that claim, because I was kind of a jerk to my teachers, and it was ridiculous.
One of the central themes of the book is discussing race using different colored objects as metaphors. But cheesecake for white women seems like a stretch. Reading it again just now, I think the point of that scene is about how the Communist is enthusiastically scooping up the sugary gloop and the protagonist is more wary of this unknown substance–a metaphor about (white) ideology not miscegeny.
That doesn’t even make good nonsense.
I recall a bit from the 1991 PBS documentary Making Sense of the Sixties, where a Boomer recounts how one day the principal walked into his English class and demanded all students give him their copies of Catcher in the Rye and forget they’d ever seen it; as result of which, they all went out and bought their own copies and actually read them – which, he said, they probably would not have if the book had not been banned but were just part of the assigned reading (that’s what Cliff’s Notes are for, after all).
When are book-banners going to learn that banning a book just makes more kids interested in reading it? It’s similar to the Streisand Effect, combined with forbidden-fruit appeal.