It’s a totally different animal from the kinds of challenges we had before, which, however wrong-headed they were, seemed sincere. We’re seeing politicians fomenting anxiety about books like ours and lessons that use books like ours in order to get support in the polls. I can save you all by selling you this bill of goods.” Richardson explained, “That’s the oldest con in the book. He and Parnell recently took their 13-year-old daughter to the musical The Music Man, where, he summarizes, the con man in the opening scene says, “You’ve got trouble, your kids have got a pool table and that’s going to lead them to ruin. Parnell added that in legislating, politicians are creating “a more unified idea behind parents protecting their children” and “a kind of extreme reaction that comes out of fears that parents have and that they have now placed at the feet of teachers, of librarians, etc.” “We felt confident the courts would find in our favor, but unfortunately what we’re seeing in Texas, in Florida, and more and more states is that it is legislators themselves that are launching attacks on the book and doing so in an organized way.”
“What we see now are politicians exploiting the fears of parents for their own political gain” and “organized attacks on intellectual freedom from members of the government.” Previously, “the government was on our side,” he said.
A school would typically refer the complaint to the school board, board members and school administrators would decide on a review process, “and at a certain point an attorney would step in and say, ‘Hey folks, FYI, it’s against the Constitution to remove this book from the school library,’ and that would put an end to it, for the most part.”Įarlier challenges, too, were usually by an individual parent or citizen “wanting to ‘protect’ their own child from the book,” Richardson continued. Earlier challenges were mostly handled locally, he explained. “It really feels that the landscape has changed fairly dramatically,” Richardson said. Justin Richardson (L) and Peter Parnell (R), photos by each other, courtesy of Simon & Schuster
is different from anything they’ve seen before, they told me in an interview. Yet the current surge of book bans and challenges sweeping through the U.S. Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s award-winning picture book, And Tango Makes Three (Simon & Schuster), based on the true story of two male penguins who hatch an egg together, has been one of the most-challenged books in the country since shortly after it was published in 2005.
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