I am convinced that the Conservatives have too much on their hands. Instead of taking a stand against, I don’t know, Supreme Court judges accept lavish gifts or something like that, trying to download a manga series from Florida schools. The group Citizens Defending Freedom intends to protect children from “violence against teachers” and “explicit sexual content” with this censorship.
Earlier this week, an advocacy group called Citizens Defending Freedom announced its intention to pressure Florida high schools to remove A classroom for murder from libraries. AC is a manga series in which an alien blows up the moon and then threatens to destroy the entire earth. He tells the world government that he will allow the students to kill him and that they must make it to graduation. In the meantime, he teaches them subjects such as mathematics and English. Their lessons are sometimes interrupted when students throw knives or shoot bullets at their alien teacher. Instead of getting angry at the constant assassination attempts, the teacher rejoices when his students become better killers.
“This is a nonpartisan issue,” said the group’s director of communications, Kristen Huber Fox News. “We should all be able to agree that violence against teachers and sexually explicit content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially with taxpayer dollars.”
Guys, I can’t stress enough how stupid this whole thing is. AC is one of the most rewarding manga I’ve read in the last year. Rather than disrespecting public education, this is a beautiful story about how an alien teacher brings out the full potential of underachieving students who have given up on their future. And while porn books appear in the series, you never see actual sex scenes in them. It would be like a ban Naruto because the ninja Kakashi reads explicit adult fiction to his students.
Public school can be bad because kids are put into boxes and subjected to a standardized educational experience. The children inside AC can only become exemplary students under the tutelage of a monster who pays attention to their individual needs. It’s a lesson school officials could learn instead of trying to remove manga from the library altogether.
Of course conservative finger wagging doesn’t care about context or what art actually is means. They just want to ban things they do not understand under the pretext of protecting children. Florida is currently in an all-out culture war against anything the right wing finds offensive to their delicate sensibilities, including whether Disney is allowed to support trans rights.
If you want to check AC for yourself, you can easily access to the entire series by getting a digital subscription to VIZ for $3 a month. Take that, conservative snowflakes.