I'm glad to see "book burning" is alive and well in America. I guess that's what the conservatives mean by restoring America. Now we just need to find some really cheap labor.

Because of this particular scene in the book, I've always felt that it should not have been promoted as a children's book. I have also felt that Orson Scott Card is, IMO, unsavory for cooperating in promoting it as a children's book.

The problem isn't the outrage, it's that it's aimed at useless targets. By and large, the bigger problem with our society is complacency. When we really need outrage, e.g., to put bankers in jail for their crimes, the same busibodies are nowhere to be found.

It shows society naked. That IS pornographic.
It talks about relationships between siblings, teaches children to think critically, demonstrates adults can and do lie, shows how society is and can be manipulated by media and wont some please think of the children harmed by the reading of this terrible book !!!!

Hansel and Gretel shove a little old lady into on oven and broil her, and that's been broadly accepted as children's fare for two hundred years. A little justifiable homicide shouldn't be a big issue all of a sudden.

Bet this kid is popular.

He's 14 and running home to mommy because a book had naughty words in it..

I can see a parent running across the book and going full on "I'M A MOTHER, AND AS A MOTHER I FEEL.." mode while the kid stands there horribly embarrassed .. but for the kid to be the one who started it all... kid must be living in a bubble.

The bully was already dead when kicked. He hit his head accidentally on a knob.

Time to read the book again :)

Firing the teacher would be absurd, criminal charges would be truly insane. The former only seems in any way legitimate because of the total insanity of the latter - not for one second does a teacher deserve to lose their job for reading a perfectly innocuous (and pretty damn good, IMO) scifi novel to a class of 14 year olds.

Not to mention several books from The Old Testament.
Idiots...

The thing about protesting that kind of thing, is you put yourself at risk. This is largely why I am part of that complacent mass. I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have. The only people who can protest this stuff are people who don't have much to begin with, and they just get shrugged off as "jobless hippies". It's actually a suspiciously well engineered little system.

Calling up the school in a huff because the cafeteria serves junk food on the other hand.. very low risk for the bored stay at home mom..

It was read to the class. Doesn't it mean it was pornophonic? Which has to be less severe. I mean... if it were the same in terms of arousal effectiveness, I imagine radio porn would be rampant.

Other banned books from the past:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
American Heritage Dictionary
Catcher in the Rye
Fahrenheit 451
From Here to Eternity
The Grapes of Wrath

With the exception of the dictionary, all are timeless works of great art. What wikipedia says about Ender's game:

Reception to the book has generally been positive, though some critics have denounced Card's perceived justification of his characters' violent actions.[3][4] It has also become suggested reading for many military organizations, including the United States Marine Corps.[5] Ender's Game won the 1985 Nebula Award for best novel[6] and the 1986 Hugo Award for best novel.

Hey, why did <blockquote></blockquote> stop working?

At any rate, the teacher should be reinstated and the damned administrators should be fired. TFA is still loading and I missed this book (looks like a great one I need to read, too, trip to the library this Saturday). What's supposed to be pornographic about it?

As to the complaining parent, maybe the bitch should just stick to Dr Suess? Oh, she'll probably think Cat in the Hat is porno, too.

No matter how good something is, someone is going to say it's utter shit.

Tricky moral situations are essential for children's reading. Feeding children sanitized narratives only primes them to accept the sanitizied narratives that are fed to us by government and media. Expose children to grey moral areas early, and they will be better equipped to handle grey moral areas in life.

Let's TP the mother's home. My mom was/is very conservative but she never made a fuss about literature she found objectionable. She simply told the teacher that her kid would not be reading that book/seeing the movie until he was older (high school). That's the proper way to handle it. Like an adult instead of a whiny little bitch demanding the teacher be fired.

Nudity == nudity not porn. It is our natural state and nothing to be ashamed of.

Porn == sex. I don't recall any sex in Ender's Game (or the sequel Speaker for the Dead). So NOT pornographic.

This is as crazy as the government arresting teens who took nude photos with their phones, and then claiming it's porn. It isn't porn if there's no sex stupid cops and stupid politicians. Arrest them for the actual crime committed (nudity)..... oh that's right. The SCOTUS said nudity is not a crime.

There's more naked violent children in Lord of the Flies than there is in Enders Game.
Read that at school when I was 14.

Your circumstances are perfect for getting involved politically.

Start locally. Have you written a PAPER letter to your Congress critters yet? To your governor? To your state legislature?

If not, why not?

Have you volunteered for a political candidate?

This has nothing to do with conservatism. The problem is people who are simply pants on head retarded. They come in so-called progressive flavors too.

Congratulations slave, you have proven the Conservatives right, they believed that making the working class home owners would turn them into good reliable little workers unwilling to risk the house they can't afford with silly things such as looking for a new job, or even thinking about striking.

Why bother with capturing slaves when the feeble just whip themselves?

Mind you, you wouldn't be so bad, if the bleeding hearts wouldn't feel sorry you if you get slaughtered in the revolution. But somehow, your kind then suddenly turns into "innocent" citizens and not supporters of the regime.

The teacher should be fired. The kids should have been reading their own books instead of having the book read aloud to them. How can everyone else be so far off topic?

My kid had no interest in reading until I got him started on Ben Bova's Orion series. He's 11 and loves it. Yes it's full violence, and sex, and "porn" - I mean, sex with a goddess while covered with animal entrails amid a stone age civilization? It doesn't get any better!

The early Card stuff is next; Planet Called Treason, Ender's Game, you name it. Those are boy books!

I mean school is so screwed up that when we read the Canterbury Tales, the cool tales were the ones that could not be assigned.

Hehe... I read The Wife Of Bath with my 14 year old daughter. Nothing like the prologue where she rants about the uselessness of virginity. Again, want to hold a teenager's attention while reading the classics? Show then the classics!

It's not a picture book. Any child nudity you saw while reading it (or listening to it in audiobook form or otherwise having it read to you) you produced yourself in your own mind.

"That" look is not in the least bit anorexic, and if you think it is, perhaps you need to lay off the fritos for awhile.

She is not unrealistically thin, and you'd be doing yourself a favor by trying to look like that. Yes, there are some models who truly are unrealistically thin and set unrealistic standards of beauty. She is not one of them.

The bible is one of the most pornographic and violence filled books ever.

Two of the more pornographic passages, yes the second one is incest, no it is not taken out of context in the least.

Ezekiel 23:20
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Genesis 19:32
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

Then, frankly, you don't belong in a democratic society. The whole point of our society and especially how the U.S. was set up to begin with was so that anyone in the populous could fight for what they believe is right without the fear of losing everything they have for speaking up. I am beginning to think that complacency isn't the real problem here, cowardice is. When did America get castrated by the corporations and the bullies? It's a sad day in a democracy when the people are afraid to say something is right or wrong because they are afraid to lose everything.

I don't care much for Bill Maher, but he was spot-on when he said "even gay men don't think about gay sex as much as Rick Santorum does".

Almost paid for.. never had any major financial trouble in my life. Just because some people bought houses way out of their price range doesn't mean every home owner ends up screwing themselves. I went for a reasonably priced house with a reasonable term mortgage and 30% down payment (protip: if you can't save up at least 20% within a reasonable time.. do't buy it!) and with room to breath in the event of a major interest rate hike or other financial hardship.

I've lived within my means and have kept up on my retirement savings.

Yes.. job I like, decent money, house, car, time to spend on my hobbies.. my life is just terrible. I get that the people struggling down there are frustrated, and it's nice to think that the middle class only think they are happy but are really suffering.. however the truth is we are for the most part legitimately happy. That's why we arn't out protesting...

The middle class probably need to be on board to have a hope in hell in getting anywhere with that one.

Then again, I'm Canadian... thing's arn't _as_ bleak up here yet.

Numerous occasions [npr.org] in the past three years, in fact. Do us all a favor, and go educate yourself, instead of being a dipshit with a half-assed political agenda.

Fact: Overly conservative parents object to books that they consider "pornographic" or "anti-religious." (see: Ender's Game)
Fact: Overly liberal parents object to books that they consider too "racist" or "insensitive." (see: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

If you actually care to read a fairly nuanced essay about book censorship, you could start here [themillions.com]. Then you could stop pretending that there's any difference between overly protective 'conservative' parents and overly protective 'liberal' parents when it comes to their children reading material that goes against the orthodoxy those children are being taught at home.

Your sniveling cowardice makes me want to vomit. You deserve to be stomped. Unfortunately, your disgusting weakness will only get OTHER people stomped. I have been raising hell about getting critical problems fixed for 20 years or so, occasionally WINNING those fights, and guess what? There have been NO destructive consequences to my life. None. Zero.

Nothing can be done for people like you. Go whimper in your little corner, terrified of any word or act that might challenge the absolute dominance of your Rightful Lords And Masters.

Agreed. I can't help but chuckle at the outrage when I tell the neighbors that we had a fairly decent intro to mammalian reproductory systems in grade 4 biology. Oh yeah, we did have biology and history as separate subjects starting in grade 4, then chemistry and physics starting in grade 5.

The biggest conservative idiocy IMHO is the whine about sexualizing/objectifying children. Well, it's the adults who do it for crying out loud, not kids! For a kid, learning about the reproductive system has no subtexts at all, and is just as much of a non-loaded topic as learning about, say, basics of organic chemistry like perchance simple hydrocarbons. People who believe that knowledge of the reproductive system is somehow a taboo/dirty subject are the ones where the problem is -- it's not with the subject, nor with the kids, it's with the parents who unfortunately were not brought up in a sane environment, and their minds got so warped around those subjects that they can't deal with them in a normal way.

These are the same people who bombard the FCC the moment Janet Jackson flashes a boob but have no problem with hours of people being shot to death on TV.

Having gone to a high school where no less than ten of the students I saw everyday became mommies long before graduation, but no attempts at xeno/genocide, it doesn't really come as a big surprise to me.

Naw, I'm pretty sure it went like this:

Parent: This book is pornographic and the teacher is reading it to my 14 yr old!
Superintendent: Ender's Game? (thinking: I haven't read that) What parts are pornographic? (read: take quotes out of context and make them sound bad)
Parent: (thinking: shit! I haven't read it either! I just hate that teacher!) .... um.... (quickly googles ender's game pornographic [google.com]) .... See! It's right there, at the top of google! Ender's Game is pornographic! [plover.net]
Superintendent: OH! Well! That changes everything! I will definitely fire that teacher! .... by the way, are you voting for Santorum? Google "Santorum" and let's see what comes up.... [wikipedia.org]

Of course they should. What do you think the school system is for exactly?

No offense, I'm against this book ban and any other on a school wide scale, but parents should always have the last word on education (since they could after-all simply homeschool if they had the resources). There's no reason a public school system should have the right to dictate education without parental approval, unless you believe in something other than the freedoms America no longer stands for, of course.

...Says the guy posting anonymously. Nice.

I don't care about the crazy soccer moms here. I care that the school board is failing utterly at their job. They are supposed to insulate teachers from crazy parents. They are supposed to be rational, and say "Yes, Mrs. Smith, we heard you, but we leave individual book assignments to the teachers. If you're unhappy with the content the public education system provides, take your child down the street to the private school that more closely matches your morals. Yes, we know it's expensive, but that's your choice."

And yes, a vocal minority of outraged parents (bonded together by a common hatred of porn / literature / science / logic / foreign accents / whatever) will put up their own flat-earth candidate, and will get that school board member fired. Term limits of one would prevent them from worrying about it too much.

Instead, what this school board did is told all their teachers "you're going to get fired for teaching anything that goes against the arbitrary capricious whims of any nutcake parent." And they told every nutcake parent in the district "want to get that unmarried pregnant teacher fired? Just accuse her of having dyed her hair, we're just as crazy as you and we'll fire her for you." That board may as well not exist for all the good they're doing their school system.

It has probably to do with the fact, that fully blown genocide actually requires skill, while getting pregnant (yourself or getting someone else pregnant) mainly requires the absence of skills - skills one can be taught by actually being educated about sexuality.

You don't have to like his writing, but he's a renowned author with real skills.

Your first two statements are true. The last is provably false if you're referring to writing skill. He may have skill in water polo or stacking blocks of wood into tall towers, but he can't write for shit.

And as long as you keep it text, even Dr. Girlfriend can be an operator.

I don't have kids so I don't really know what's going through these people's heads. I've always suspected that everybody hopes that if nobody brings it up, it'll never occur to the teenagers to get up to mischief. It becomes a perpetual "no it cannot be a problem right now, maybe next year" sort of thing. So if something like sex-ed comes along, it causes the issue to come up at an inopportune time (note: There is no opportune time...) , so they get frustrated that this particular problem is coming up right now. The result? People don't want their kids exposed to things that'll make them think about sex. I'd like to think I'm right, but the thing that baffles me the most about this is all these parents, for some reason, don't remember what being a teenager was like. Remember Back to the Future? Remember Marty's Mom? "I never did things like call boys or park in a car with a boy" and all that other stuff? That's the image I get in my head when I think about these people.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Whatever their motivations, I agree that trying to keep their kids as pure as the Flanders family is not a useful solution. I just don't see why they'd even have violence on their radar until they start seeing their kids actually hurting each other. Until then, there actually is some sense in being offended by pornographic imagery and turning a blind eye to violence on TV. It's a non-argument, sorry.

...as opposed to feeding them everything the state wants them to believe, thereby eliminating differences in thought.

I'd rather have a system with a few misguided nimrods than one where the state provides everything and has people depend on it thereby. Nice concept of freedom there.

Party is as party does.

So does that mean that gun control has at time been a "conservative" goal because gun control laws have at times been backed by Republicans?

Also - if Democrat != liberal, then what's the point of having a Democratic party?

To present voters with the illusion of choice. To ensure that when a "vote the bums out" election occurs, that voters have a choice between Corporate Whore Warmonger A and Corporate Whore Warmonger B. To keep the rubes distracted with TV debates over abortion rights to fight the shared agenda of both parties: endless war, shredding the Constitution, and selling out the vast majority of Americans to make the rich richer.

Glad I'm not the only one who wondered why OSC is so revered. I loved the Ender short story, and read quite a few of this guy's novels thinking they would be just as thought provoking, but each book I read made me like him less and less.

I guess you don't like his writing style. I don't know that it's very prosaic but he does tell a great story. I remeber so many great authors I had to read in English lit. They had great style. Really wonderful writers. They couldn't tell a story for shit though. Theodore Dreiser? Really. What shit. Sylish shit is still shit. I think I read more polished turds in High School than I knew existed.

I guess you don't like his writing style.

No, his style is not the problem.

I think I read more polished turds in High School than I knew existed.

Yes, I think I read Ender's Game in high school. But I also read The Tempest, The Forever War, Ringworld, Pale Fire, Crime and Punishment and Gravity's Rainbow, so I was ultimately able to tell the difference between gold and shit. I also learned that "teen fiction" like Ender's Game is insulting to teens. It is possible to write for an adolescent audience without telling you what to think, like Card often does. And most "teen fiction" or "young adult fiction" is really most appropriate for 10 and 11 year olds who have to be convinced to read a book. By the time a kid is 13, they no longer need to be pandered to.

Orson Scott Card is one of the most overrated writers ever to write juvenile fiction. He and Ayn Rand are #1 and #2 on that list, but I admit to not being able to decide on the order.

No, everyone but the child (who doesn't know any better) and the teacher (who was doing their job) is at fault. The parent for failing to do actual parenting. The school for knuckling. Etc.

Scroll up.

See those links I provided?

Good. Now go read.

Quoting one sentence that says "she said they should put it in the library," while disregarding the sentence before it where it's reported that the woman in question has *actually* asked the school board to ban the book in question from use in school curriculum across the entire district, and repeatedly insisting that I provided no other information (ALA list of most-banned books? NPR report with map sourced from the ALA showing bans & challenges over the past 3 years? Said map with summary of each case, the book(s) in question, and the location where it was reported from, providing you with ample evidence to go read more details on your own?) just screams "disingenuous."

I'm done with this conversation, you're being deliberately obtuse, and I have neither the patience nor the inclination to educate you further. As I said previously, I can lead you to information, but I can't make you think.