In a particularly bird-brained political move, a Florida school district has reportedly banned books about real-life same-sex penguin couples from classrooms and school libraries.
The award-winning 2005 children’s book “And Tango Makes Three” features a pair of real-life male chinstrap penguins – Roy and Silo – who build a nest together at the zoo in New York’s Central Park. The birds eventually “adopted” an orphaned penguin chick (Tango) and raised it as their own. (Other pairs of same-sex penguins have been found at other zoos.)
However, Florida’s Lake County School District has reportedly determined that the fact is prohibited for minors under a state law called “Don’t Talk Gay” engineered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), the independent journalism site Popular Information reported Thursday. . The law effectively bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in Florida schools through third grade.
Popular information found the district’s list of banned books in public records obtained through the Florida Freedom to Read Project. The district claimed the book, by authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was one of the books it had “administratively disposed of” to comply with the DeSantis law.
Screen Shot/General Information
The free speech organization PEN reported last year that Florida’s Collier County School District placed warning labels on more than 100 books — including “And Tango Makes Three” — listed in the district’s online library catalog. A physical label is also attached to the hard copy of the book.
The ultra-conservative Florida Citizens Alliance listed “Tango” among books it inaccurately claimed contained “indecent and offensive material” in its 2021 report “Porn in Schools.” (The book does not contain explicit sexual material.) Critics complain that books on the list are almost always automatically banned in Florida because school district leaders don’t want the headache of dealing with organized bands of book-banning zealots, The New York Times reported last month. the past
Even the contribution of dictionaries to schools has been held because of the tangled requirements that the reading material must now be assessed for suitability by specially trained country readers.
“Tango” is often the target of book banners. In 2015, The Daily Express was named in a surprising list of banned books – which also included “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Where’s Waldo.” The newspaper called “Tango” a “delightful children’s tale about two penguins who fall in love and adopt a baby” that “doesn’t really scream controversy.”
At least 50 groups across the country are working to ban the growing number of books from school libraries, according to a PEN report.
HuffPost could not immediately reach Lake County Schools for comment.