The Four Color Media Monitor

Anime News Network has a whole report about manga books with content potentially unsuited for children being removed from school libraries:

In the past two months, two school districts in Tennessee have listed the books, including manga series, that they have removed from school libraries. Other school districts in Tennessee are considering how to comply with a new state law this year to limit books in school libraries.

The Rutherford County Schools removed over 150 titles from its school libraries on November 11 after board member Frances Rosales flagged them a day earlier. The first eight volumes of Yūsei Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga and volume 1 of Atsushi Ōkubo's Fire Force are among the titles under review.

Another board member, Caleb Tidwell, said that the titles were sexually explicit under school board policy and state obscenity laws. During a September board meeting, one of Tidwell's supporters for banning the books said that they contained "pornographic material." [...]

Rosales told Chalkbeat, a news organization dedicated to education in America, that she used Wilson County's list of removed books as well as the Book Looks website to compile the list of books to remove in Rutherford County Schools. (School districts in other states removed books such as Assassination Classroom partly on the basis of reviews on Book Looks last year.)

The Tennessee state legislature made changes to the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 on July 1 to expand the definition of obscenity.

Any material "containing nudity or describes or depicts sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence or sadomasochistic abuse" are now prohibited with the amended act. Material which appeals to the "prurient interest" should also be under consideration for age appropriateness. [...]

The Brevard Public Schools Board in Florida banned the first volume of Shō Harusono's Sasaki and Miyano boys-love manga from the district's school libraries during a board meeting on August 27 earlier this year. A person in the district challenged the book's inclusion in the schools' libraries on the grounds that "sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested, or implanted" in the youth. The complaint also included concerns children would be "exposed to age-inappropriate, obscene, explicit content" and that there was "no value in making homosexual books available at school." The book is rated for T for Teens.

One must wonder if they believe banning such material from schools constitutes a literal ban, and/or censorship. Because if you can buy this stuff at bookstores and online stores, then it's not like it's literally being banned and censored. Do they realize this material, no matter the artistic quality, is unsuitable for children? Once, there may have been a time they did, but now that's tragically no longer the case for some of these ideologues, and it's led to so much moral damage. And who knows how many students have been influenced for the worse by manga books like Assassination Classroom and the themes it's built on?

It's good there's schools taking the stepsn needed to get explicit manga like this out of their libraries, but are they doing the same when it comes to USA graphic novels like Gender Queer? Well, I guess it's safe to say that in a state like Tennessee, they are, but in states like Illinois, Oregon and Minnesota, it could be a lot harder to get this stuff out of the school systems. Though with Donald Trump now reelected as POTUS, there could be good news to come on this issue, and they'll be getting propaganda published in the USA out of the schools too.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, golden calf of death, golden calf of LGBT, golden calf of villainy, libraries, manga and anime, msm propaganda, politics, violence