Pinney Pincher

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on May 23, 2006 4:21PM

We here at the Chicagoist offices only do what’s good for us: we feed our bodies all the right foods, we watch only educational television programming, we exercise regularly, we don’t drink, don’t smoke (what do we do?), don’t gossip, don’t make promises we can’t keep, don’t kiss on the first date and don’t have sex without love.

So, it follows logically that we’re all for banning books. We think it’s a good idea to keep our minds filled with only clean-living ideas and to effectively push away anything that might make us think. Now, don’t get us wrong, we’re not for banning ALL books, just some books, the really good ones, ‘cause that’s how we like to do things.

Luckily, we have a book-banning friend in Arlington Heights! Leslie Pinney, a school board member for District 214, thinks that seven books on the current high school reading list should be banned. Some of the books she’s looking to do away with are “Slaughterhouse Five”, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”, and “Freakonomics”. She admits that she’s only read a few of the books, but in one article we found, she says she hasn’t read any. We think her sweeping generalizations over books she's never read are very persuasive, and find ourselves lucky to have such a thorough mind to stand up for our book-banning beliefs.

We also found this site, which calls for action in support of Ms. Pinney (we’ll be at the meeting, wearing our sensible flats). It lists some of the nasty language in the books she seeks to ban (but hasn’t read). What we found most enjoyable was the Footloosian argument way at the bottom, citing "possibly offensive" text from the Bible as well.

But see, that's different, 'cause that's the Bible.

Duh.