"Brown Bear, Brown Bear" is one of my kids' favorite books growing up. Now the far-right conservatives on the State Board of Education have voted to remove it, and all the other works by that author, from our public school classrooms. Why? Because they stupidly confused his name with that of another author who wrote a book titled "Ethical Marxism." So first off they acted impulsively, which is typical of rightwing reactionaries, and failed to do their homework.
But to understand further how stupid this is, you have to understand that they were not voting to remove what they thought was a book about Marxism from a 3rd Grade curriculum, which would have been somewhat understandable. They knew very well that they were voting to remove "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" which has nothing to do with political or economic theories. They voted to remove all books by Bill Martin because they mistakenly thought he had written a book about Marxism at some time, which they admit they had not read, and was not being distributed to public school classrooms.
So, they are essentially trying to enforce a rigid ideological purity by purging any works by authors who might hold views contrary to theirs, irregardless of what their books are about. But in this case at least they screwed up because they were too stupid and lazy to figure out that there might be more than one author with the name Bill Martin.
I just hope they don't figure out that Dr. Seuss was a liberal before we have an opportunity to vote these idiots out of office later this year.
One of the far-right idiots who voted to ban "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" is Ken Mercer, a former Republican state representative who represents the San Antonio area where I live.
Fortunately, Mercer is being challenged by a more moderate Republican - Tim Tuggey - in the primary and then Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau in the general.
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