Gay Penguin Book Authors Sue Over Ban
A group of students and the authors of And Tango Makes Three, a story about two male penguins raising a chick, are suing the Lake County school district in Florida over the book’s removal from libraries.Published in 2005, the award-winning And Tango Makes Three is based on the true story of Roy and Silo, a pair of male penguins at the Central Park Zoo, who helped protect and hatch an egg and raised the penguin chick, Tango, that emerged from it.Authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell were inspired to write the book after hearing about how Roy and Silo were “completely devoted to each other,” according to a New York Times article.While the book is geared towards 4- to 8-year-olds and does not contain sexually explicit content, Florida school district authorities banned the book.
They removed it from school library shelves, citing Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, also known as the “Don’t Say Law.”Under the law, which is intended to allow parents to have a greater say over the content of their classroom lessons, teachers in public schools are barred from providing classroom “instruction” — which is vaguely defined — on sexual orientation and gender identity.“We removed access to And Tango Makes Three for our kindergarten through third-grade students in alignment with Florida House Bill 1557, which at the time prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for those grade levels,” Sherri Owens, a spokesperson for Lake County Schools, told the Times in an email.Parnell and Richardson and the parents of five school-age students subsequently sued to challenge the county’s ban on Tango.In the lawsuit, filed in U.S.
