Slaughterhouse-Five banned by Missouri school

VONNEGUT BANNED: Apparently Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned by a Missouri school, following claims by a local university professor that the author's celebrated second novel "contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame." The school, in the same move, banished Sarah Ockler's young adult novel Twenty Boy Summer. The Guardian reports:

Following the decision to remove her novel from school shelves in Missouri, Ockler said that "you can ban my books from every damn district in the country — I'm still not going to write to send messages or make teens feel guilty because they've made choices that some people want to pretend don't exist. That's my choice. And I'll never be ashamed of my choice to write about real issues." [...] The "crazy train", she added, "has finally derailed" following the Missouri ban. "Look, I've said it before and I'll say it a million times more. I get that my book isn't appropriate for all teens, and that some parents are opposed to the content. That's fine. Read it and decide for your own family. I wish more parents would do that — get involved in their kids' reading and discuss the issues the books portray. But don't make that decision for everyone else's family by limiting a book's availability and burying the issue under guise of a 'curriculum discussion'."

I really can't stand this sort of thing; if you're offended by literary content about sex and other adult themes, for God's sake, don't read Shakespeare: Othello, to name one, is laced with dialogue of a sexual nature.