Books and graphic novels are persistently banned in schools and libraries across the country due to complaints from fundamentalist groups and overbearing parents who feel it their responsibility to suppress access to legal speech they find objectionable. A group of…
Author: Justin Brown
The Mayor Who Failed to Censor Comics
A historical milepost article on The Columbus Dispatch website, an Ohio-based periodical, revisits September 28, 1954, when the city’s mayor composed a panel to review the censorship of comics. In assembling the panel, Columbus mayor M.E. Sensenbrenner noted that the FBI…
Zut Alors! Stockholm Library Briefly Bans Tintin
In the course of one day, a library in Sweden banned and then lifted the ban on Tintin comics. The comic series, by Belgian comic artist Georges Remi, is about the misadventures of a young reporter and his dog and is…
Unshelved Celebrates Virtual Read-Out
Unshelved, a webcomic created by Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes, ran a series of comic strips this week to celebrate Banned Books Week’s Virtual Read-Out. According to the website’s About page, Ambaum and Barnes began publishing Unshelved, which focuses on…
Stanford University Hosts “When Artists Attack the King” Exhibition
If you live near or are visiting Stanford University in the near future, you should take advantage of a free exhibition of various works by 19th century French caricaturist Honore Daumier. Daumier’s works often reflected political and social satire, and…
Comic Spring in the Arab World
Comic artists and cartoonists in Arab nations and much of the Middle East have been cultivating a new era of cultural, social, and political importance of the media. These artists have been defiant, often risking their lives in the face…
Cartoonist Battles Frivolous Lawsuits with Comedic Protest
The Oatmeal, a website that features the work of cartoonist and programmer Matthew Inman, has been entangled in a legal dispute with the attorney of competitor Funny Junk, a comedy site that posts user-uploaded images. After exercising his First Amendment…
New Arizona Law: Schools and Libraries Comply or Lose Funding
Public schools and libraries in Arizona will be at the mercy of a new law, effective August 1, that requires the institutions to block “obscene” materials on the internet or they will lose 10 percent of their funding, according to…
‘Alarming’ Increase in Google Censorship Requests
The internet search engine Google has been subject to an “alarming” increase in requests to censor and block certain search results and content over the last six months of 2011, according to recent articles from the Huffington Post and The Washington Post.
Blogger Justin Brown takes a look at the increase in censorship requests around the world and from the United States after the jump.
“In Our Mothers’ House” Restricted Access in Utah School District
With the President’s recent open approval of same-sex marriage; a federal appeals court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (claiming it unconstitutional); the success of Life with Archie #16, featuring the marriage of a gay character; and Marvel and DC’s inclusion of prominent storylines about gay characters, one may surmise it is easy for everyone to access constitutionally-protected LGBT materials. This is not the case, as students in a school district north of Salt Lake City will have to get parental permission before checking out a book about a lesbian couple raising a family, according to a recent article on the Huffington Post.
Click through for excerpts from the article and a look at protests against other LGBT content by CBLDF blogger Justin Brown.