Penguins Top Challenged Books List Yet Again

For the fourth time, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, based on the real-life story of two male penguins who raise a chick from an orphaned egg, tops the American Library Association’s (ALA) latest Top Ten list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books. The penguins take over again after slipping to number two last year—but clearly the tuxedoed avians have staying power.

Parnell and Richardson, who are raising their own very human daughter, were kind enough a couple of years ago to share their thoughts on heading up the Most Challenged list. They bear repeating:

We can think of lists we’d prefer to top.

I will say that, as gay men of a certain age, we are no strangers to fear and anger being directed towards us and families like ours. But unlike in the debate of gays in the military, gays at the altar, gays in the boy scouts, and so on, this time the government is squarely behind us, and that makes all the difference. And not only is the US Constitution indisputably on our side (the U.S. Supreme Court wrote about a similar case of book suppression in 1982 “Our Constitution does not permit the suppression of ideas”), but throughout these years of challenges we have had the great support of the American Library Association, the ACLU, and PEN America as well as countless teachers, librarians, parents, and most meaningful to us, children. When a group of New York City 5th graders get together to give you an award for writing a book that furthers the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., it becomes much easier to shake the image of the angry mother waving your book around on Fox News.

Also making the ALA list this year (coming in at number nine) was Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, ed. Amy Sonnie. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) called it “the first creative resource by and for queer and questioning youth of every color, class, religion, gender and ability.” School Library Journal has more on one of the challenges to the book, in which a library director in New Jersey was asked by a member of Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project to remove the book from the shelves, and agreed, calling it “child pornography.” (It seems a rare case in which the librarian wasn’t defending the freedom to read.)

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