FBLA: YA Novel Gets Old Folks Riled Up

Over at FishbowlLA, co-editor Tina Dupuy caught wind of a lawsuit in West Bend, Wisconsin, where four elderly plaintiffs, declaring themselves members of the Christian Civil Liberties Union, sought not just to have Baby Be-Bop, a YA novel by Francesca Lia Block, banned from their public library, they wanted to publicly burn or destroy by another means” the book, then collect $30,000 each in compensatory damages “for being exposed to the book in a library display,” and then they wanted the mayor to resign for letting the book go on display at all.

According to the complaint, Baby Be-Bop is “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian,” which, as far as we can tell. based on the information in the complaint and our decade-old recollection of the novel, means that it has profanity, uses “the n-word” contextually for the sake of social verisimilitude, and may possibly suggest that hating somebody for being gay is more immoral than, say, being gay. (Alternatively, the “anti-Christian” thing could have to do with the ghostly apparitions; we concede we have not read the CCLU’s complaint cover to cover.)

This isn’t the only complaint the West Bend public library has to deal with; apparently, the morality crusade has been going on so long that an anonymous citizen has started up a blog to counter all the attacks.

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