This article has been turned into a video for our YouTube channel using superior-to-magic technology. If you’re the kind of person who thinks videos are witchcraft, you can find the original text version below.
You wouldn’t think that the Harry Potter series is a controversial group of books, but, apparently, it really fucking is and to date, it remains one of the books school libraries in the US have the most trouble stocking because parents keep complaining about it.
There are several key complaints dipshit parents use to try and get the book banned and as you’d expect, all of them are incredibly stupid. One of the most common complaints from religious parents is that the book promotes witchcraft or the occult, which is of course a terrible thing because nobody in the Bible ever uses magic to solve their problems. Now if you think we’re being ignorant or mean spirited about religious folk who think this way, we should point out that in the year 2000 a Catholic school in the UK banned the series for exactly that reason, while simultaneously allowing pupils to study The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because, and we quote: “it shows an evil witch who is overcome by the powers of good“.
But we’re not done yet, over in the US, that exact argument was used by a mother in Georgia in 2006 to try and get the book banned from schools because she felt that it promoted the Wiccan religion to children, a religion which specifically tells its followers to “minimise the harm they do to others“. What makes this extra juicy is that according to actual Wiccans who we’re assuming are more of an authority on Wiccan culture than us, virtually everything people point to as evidence the books promote the Wiccan religion, like demonic possession, sorcery and curses, have fuck all to do with the Wiccan religion. Just in case you’re not quite annoyed enough yet, you may like to know that schools in the same state briefly cut funding to provide schools with books containing Spanish because some assholes didn’t want their tax dollars spent on things immigrant children might enjoy. Yeah, that happened.
Of course fans of the the Harry Potter series will know that a lot of these complaints are baseless and the by-product of over-sensitive parents and religious types getting their Muggle panties in a bunch. And we’re guessing people who only have a passing interest in Harry Potter don’t give a shit one way or the other, but here’s the thing, the people who don’t want this series in schools are amazingly resilient and stubborn.
As the image at the top of this page notes, in 2000, the Harry Potter series was literally the most challenged book in the States with more people complaining about it finding its way into school libraries than they did about a book about terrorism in a school, called “The Terrorist“. As an idea of the kind of people who complain about the books children are allowed to read, other books that were challenged that year included “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings“, a book about a young black girl telling racism to eat a dick and “The Chocolate War“, a book about it being okay to not fit in at high school.
Here’s where things get really depressing though, the Harry Potter series topped this list for 9 years straight, meaning people have been bitterly complaining about kids reading the Harry Potter series for longer than the span of time in which the books take place. All because they’re stuck in the belief that that book promotes evil, the occult or the benefits of being a wizard, when in reality we all know the entire series is an allegory for child abuse.
