Once upon a time in America there lived a pair of penguins called Roy and Silo. They were just like the other penguin couples in their zoo, except that they were both boys. Together they sat on an egg until a chick popped out. Later two men wrote a story about them—igniting a controversy which, almost two decades later, is still blazing.
This is the story of that story, and it has many morals. It is a tale of parenting and devotion, and a fable of progress and the backlash it can provoke. It is a feathery parable of America’s divisions, in this case over freedom of speech and gay rights. An ongoing saga of politics and prejudice, in the beginning it was, first and foremost, a story about penguins…
…The authors expected objections to their fable of samesex union; the first illustrator they approached had declined on religious grounds. But they could not have anticipated the way penguins came to be enlisted as political warriors. “The March of the Penguins”, a documentary about emperor penguins in Antarctica, was released later in 2005. Some conservatives saw those birds as exemplars of parental devotion and stable relationships…
…After that, the herring was in the penguin pool. The American Library Association (ala) tracks “challenges” to books in public and school libraries ie, bids to have them removed or access to them restricted. By its count “And Tango Makes Three” was the most targeted book in America in 2006-08, and again in 2010. Complainants alleged that it is “antifamily” and “promotes the homosexual agenda”. Penguin skirmishes erupted overseas: Singapore’s authorities resolved to pulp library copies of the book until, amid an outcry, it was moved to the adult shelves instead…
…A final confusion is over children and reading. It is not a mechanistic process whereby a story propounds a message and a child absorbs it. To think it is, says Prof Marah Gubar, an expert on children’s literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to see young readers as defenceless blank slates, altogether inferior to grownups and worryingly impressionable. In reality they are, like adults, exposed to umpteen competing influences that they sift and process. As anyone who has read to a toddler knows, Dr Gubar notes, they already have tastes and ideas; they interpret books—which tend to have several possible meanings—in their own ways. The response to this one might be, “I wanna be a zookeeper!” In the encounter between child and book, “It takes two to tango.”
Read more here…
(Please Note: Paywall)