Sweet Lord, Leonard Pitts does it again:
I’m reminded of how someone challenged me the other day on my contention that anti-intellectualism has overtaken this land. I mentioned by way of example Palin’s Bible literalism, but really, there’s so much more. There’s the “Jay Walking” segment on Leno. There’s this notion that “elite” is a four-letter word. There’s the White House’s censorship and politicization of science. There’s the recent survey that found that more people can name all five Simpsons than all five freedoms enumerated in the 1st Amendment.
And there’s this: as many as 50,000 incidents since 1990 in which a book was forced to justify its existence. We’re talking books like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” books like “The Color Purple,” books like “Harry Potter” and, yes, books like “Daddy’s Roommate,” books that offended because they expressed ideas that made someone uncomfortable.
