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that book was censored because Twain committed the blasphemy of depicting a "nigger" as an actual, living, feeling human being, who had his good qualities and looked after Huck as best he could.

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The Republicans in Wisconsin have there panties in a wad over a literature textbook used in the eighth grade in some schools. It turns out that the text has an essay by (at the time of writing) a member of the US Senate, Barack Obama. The text in question is the McDoougal Littel Literature book, apparently the 2008 edition. Now, as I remember it takes around two years or more to get a textbook published. The book publisher obviously “knew” that Obama was running for President, some day.
There is a 15 page essay by Obama in the book (counting the pictures), obviously intended to indoctrinate students. This guy joins the rest of the book banners by suggesting on the Fox segment that the school districts literally cut those pages out of every copy of the text.

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In May, 1989, Republicans, led by conservative Jesse Helms, the elderly Inquisitional senator from North Carolina, denounced on the Senate floor any grant of an NEA federal subsidy that was not censored according to a "national arts policy" against elitist blasphemy, sex, and violence.

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This is an open forum, however, where all Americans are welcome to respectfully offer their opinions, regardless of party affiliation and whether we endorse them or not.

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Florida Republicans have potentially handicapped the economic stimulus of their program with a heavy dose of conservative censorship:

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Movies and TV shows with gay characters could be ineligible for a "family-friendly" tax credit in Florida under a little-noticed provision tucked into a $75 million incentive package that Republican House leaders hope will attract film and entertainment jobs to the state.

The bill would prohibit productions with "nontraditional family values" from receiving a so-called family-friendly tax credit. But it doesn't define what "nontraditional family values" are, something the bill's sponsor had a hard time doing, too.

"Think of it as like Mayberry," state Rep. Stephen Precourt, R-Orlando, said, referring to The Andy Griffith Show. "That's when I grew up, the '60s. That's what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?"

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Just elected Tea Party-backed Florida Republican Allen West made the comments on an internet radio station, saying the government “should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled (Assange).”

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A publisher in Alabama has caused controversy by cutting the word "nigger" from a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

The word nigger appears more than 200 times in the original Hucklebury Finn alone, but the new edition from NewSouth Books replaces the word with "slave" throughout.

NewSouth has been bombarded with emails and phone calls questioning the value of sanitising a classic work of 19th century literature for the sake of modern sensibilities.

But spokeswoman Suzanne La Rosa says the censorship allows the book to be read in schools, where it was becoming shunned.

"We were persuaded by Dr Alan Griven, who is a Twain scholar, that increasingly there was pre-emptive censorship on the part of teachers who were increasingly uncomfortable teaching the text for reasons of the racial slurs," she said.

"It occurred to him that an edition in which substitute words were added in would be agreeable to these people who were struggling to get these books read.

"It's not even on the curriculum lists, where it had been king for many many years."

Ms La Rosa says she understands the argument that the novel is social history as well as literature, but says censored text is not meant to replace the original.

"There are literally scores of editions of these Twain books out there on the marketplace for people who really place adherence to Twain's original text on the top of their priority lists," she said.

"We simply felt that there was room in the marketplace for a book that was a gentler read.

"This is hardly going to make a difference, really a ripple, even, in terms of what is available."

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Gayle Wald, an author and professor of English and African-American courses at George Washington University [so he's an "elitist"--university professers all are, right?--and teaches Black studie, so he MUST be a Democrat], told The Daily Caller that the alterations could do a disservice to readers.

“I have to agree with those who object to changing Twain’s text — not because of some ideal of purity, but precisely because Twain’s language forces us to confront the impurity of one the most beloved books in the American canon,” Wald told TheDC. ”Twain’s America was also a deeply racialized one, and ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ notwithstanding its celebration of the pleasures of boyhood, forces us to grapple honestly with that.”

Kim Moreland, English professor and author[English professor AND author--must truly be an elitist progressive] of “The Medieval Impulse in American Literature,” which has a chapter on Mark Twain, told TheDC that censorship gives too much power to what is censored.

“I respect Gribben’s motivations, I cited him in my book, but I think he’s wrongheaded. I understand Gribben’s concerns about alienating children with use of the language, and so I would have no problem as long as the new edition of the book is labeled as the children’s edition,” Moreland told TheDC.

Moreland said a more constructive way of dealing with the slur, at least in terms of teaching the text to young students, would be to emulate the school districts that have created specific teaching units to enable teachers to better deal with the complicated issues in the novel.

“I can imagine a young inexperienced teacher not knowing quite how to approach ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ and you have to have the courage to dive in,” Moreland said.

Margaret Soltan, another English professor at George Washington University[professor; well, that's a dead giveaway she's an elitist progressive, obviously], expressed opposition to the removal of the racial slur in Twain’s book.

“Well-meaning professors who think they’re protecting young people from mean words by taking those words out of literature are in fact exposing these people to far more danger than hurt feelings,” Soltan told TheDC.

Soltan used her professional and religious stances to explain why the derogatory term replacements would actually be detrimental to readers.

“I’m a Jew and an English professor.[Oh, gawd, and a JEW; she MUST be a liberal!] If I were so hurt and offended by every use of the word ‘kike’ and similar slurs in a work of art that I refused to engage with the work, I’d not only be unemployed; I’d be an idiot,” Soltan told TheDC. “You cannot grasp Huck’s ethical transformations in Twain’s story without first grasping the truth of his attitudes as they express themselves in his speech.”

Soltan told TheDC that it’s probably a good thing if readers are offended by the term in Twain’s text because then they will have a strong understanding of the slur’s offensive implications.

“If his speech upsets you, that’s arguably all the better, since your response dramatizes the violence of the word, and the harsh reality of the attitudes it conveys,” Soltan said.

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