A Texas high school teacher lost her job because she allowed her students to read excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary.
It was a humorous quote by Secret Annexwhich is on the local school district’s banned books list, Reports Washington Post. The students in the class were twelve or older, roughly the same age as Anne Frank when she wrote her diary.
The graphic novel published in 2018 is based on the diary of Anne Frank, who died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
The comic book was banned in several school districts in conservative Texas after parents complained about sexually suggestive passages. For example, Anne describes her genitals in her diary, while elsewhere writing that she would like to touch a friend’s breasts. Such scenes also appear in the comic book.
In an email to all parents, the Texas school wrote that the teacher apologized for letting them read the “inappropriate book.” A substitute teacher has already been hired at the school in Beaumont, east of Houston. The Texas Teachers Union condemned the dismissal, calling it an “attack on the truth.”
Conservatives want to ban comic books
The comic book has been heavily criticized by conservative groups and parents in the United States for some time. One Republican school board member in Florida called it “Anne Frank pornography.”
In April 2022, it was removed from a school library in Florida after the leader of the conservative advocacy group Mothers for Freedom said the work violated “state standards for accurate teaching of the Holocaust.”
“Pop culture enthusiast. Unable to type with boxing gloves on. Analyst. Student. Explorer.”