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Handmaids Tale Vs Wallflower

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Description: This MLCP asked me to look at and evaluate the banishment of two books: The Handmaid’s Tale and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The Handmaid’s Tale is about an anti-feminist fascist state that has replaced the United States of America because the reproduction rates have lowered dramatically. Surrogate mothers, or in this text ‘handmaids’ are assigned to “elite” or powerful couples that are having trouble having children. This book follows the story of one particular handmaid. In Judson, Texas this book was banned from the district’s AP English curriculum after a parent complained to the superintendent that this book was “sexually explicit and offensive towards Christians”. Judson is a small rural city in Texas with a strong Christian community but even with a Christian base many students, teachers and even other parents disagreed with the ban. Students argued that if The Handmaid’s Tale is banned then many of the books in their curriculum should …show more content…

The main reason as to why these parents felt that these books should be banned was because they seemed to appeal to prurient interests. They felt that the books gave off a bad message to the youth reading them. Whereas the people who fought against the ban thought the opposite. They believed that the young readers could in fact learn valuable lessons and they gave the parents of the young readers the opportunity to have important conversations with their children. In the case of Perks, the controversy caught the attention of famous novelist Judy Blume in which she too argued that it was important that kids shouldn’t be deprived of books simply based on their parent’s opinion. In both cities, for the most part the situation was handled the same way except for the overruling of The Handmaid’s Tale in Judson,

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