“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can't imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”
—Passage from The Diary of Anne Frank that parents of 7th and 8th grade students are claiming is “too graphic” and “too pornographic” to appear in classrooms. Instead, they argue, a censored version of the book should be taught if it is to be taught at all.
Gail Horalek, the parent who filed a formal complaint with her daughter’s school district in Northville, Michigan, added:
If they watch any kind of movie with a swear word in it, I have to sign a permission slip. It doesn’t mean my child is sheltered, it doesn’t mean I live in a bubble, and it doesn’t mean I’m trying to ban books.
Yes, it does. If it’s “too graphic” for middle school aged kids to read about a body part in a diary written by a girl of the same age, those kids are sheltered. Acknowledging that vaginas exist and babies come out of them isn’t pornographic, especially when many middle school aged kids can and do have sex, sometimes resulting in a pregnancy. Somehow, though, it’s more offensive than Nazis systematically murdering over 12 million human-beings in concentration camps, forcing slave labor, starving millions until dead, lining people up and shooting them in the street, and doing horrific medical experiments on unwilling participants.
