Tag: censorship

Taking Gaga Off the Lebanese Shelves

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Ashley Baxstrom: Not even a celebrity shout-out is enough to satisfy some.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that Lady Gaga’s latest album Born This Way has been unofficially banned in Lebanon on the grounds that it may be “offensive to religion” in general and Christians in particular. The office of censorship said it had collected CDs and boxes full of the offending albums were reportedly stacked in Beirut police stations, though no formal ban has been announced by the government.

And all this despite the fact that the title single gives the country a shout-out. Continue Reading →

Masking Huck's Lesson

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A new version of Huckleberry Finn has been issued; throughout, nigger is replaced with slave.  From The Autobiography of Mark Twain, posted at Newsweek:

“Do you banish all books that are likely to defile young morals, or do you stop with Huck?”
“We do not discriminate; we banish all that are hurtful to young morals.”
I picked up a book, and said—
“I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?”
“The Bible? Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“That is a strange question to ask.”
“Very well, then I withdraw it. Are you acquainted with the passages in Huck which are held to be objectionable?”
He said he was; and at my request he took pen and paper and proceeded to write them down for me. Meantime I stepped to a desk and wrote down some extracts from the Bible. I showed them to him and said I would take it as a favor if he would attach his extracts to mine and post them on the wall, so that the people could examine them and see which of the two sets they would prefer to have their young boys and girls read.

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Masking Huck’s Lesson

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A new version of Huckleberry Finn has been issued; throughout, nigger is replaced with slave.  From The Autobiography of Mark Twain, posted at Newsweek:

“Do you banish all books that are likely to defile young morals, or do you stop with Huck?”
“We do not discriminate; we banish all that are hurtful to young morals.”
I picked up a book, and said—
“I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?”
“The Bible? Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“That is a strange question to ask.”
“Very well, then I withdraw it. Are you acquainted with the passages in Huck which are held to be objectionable?”
He said he was; and at my request he took pen and paper and proceeded to write them down for me. Meantime I stepped to a desk and wrote down some extracts from the Bible. I showed them to him and said I would take it as a favor if he would attach his extracts to mine and post them on the wall, so that the people could examine them and see which of the two sets they would prefer to have their young boys and girls read.

Continue Reading →

Merry F—ing Xmas

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Abby Ohlheiser: Depending on your perspective, The National Portrait Gallery has either ruined Christmas or World AIDS Day (December 1) this year. On Wednesday, the institution caved in to “hours” of political pressure from conservative politicians and the Catholic League and removed a 4-minute excerpt of David Wojnarowotz’s piece, “Fire in my Belly” from its current exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Wojnarowotz, who died in 1992 from AIDS-related complications, created the work in response to the suffering and death of his friend and lover. The featured except contained 11 seconds of ants crawling on a crucifix. The Atlantic Wire has a round up of the coverage. There’s a different excerpt (containing the ants on Christ images) from the 30-minute work available on YouTube.  (Text on the page reads the clip “may contain material flagged by YouTube’s user community that may be inappropriate for some users.”) Continue Reading →