There we were, my 7-year-old daughter and I, sitting down together to read a Banned! Book!
I mean, banned books? Oh, bring it on! I don't "do censorship," I fight
it. I chalk up banned book efforts to ignorance and dogmatism and
misguided fears of the real world. In fact, the only things I ban in my
house -- the only things I censor -- are ignorance, dogmatism and misguided fears of the real world.
So we kept reading. We pointed at pictures! We laughed! We turned the pages.
And for the first half of Babette Cole's frequently banned and/or censored book Mommy Laid An Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come From?,
all I could think was "tame, tame, benign, and tame." What the hell
were the bored Christian housewives so upset about when they demanded
it be pulled from library shelves, hidden behind the check-out counter
and wrapped in brown paper before sending it home for review by a pair
of innocent eyes. Then we turned to page 21.
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