Ignorance Is Bliss

            In this day and age artists are constantly trying to come up with something new and exciting, go against the grain, and challenge the mainstream ways. There was an article that I read in our textbook that discussed a book that was doing exactly that. According to this article called, “A Family of a Different Feather”, Sarah Pederson explains how a children’s book made it on the list of most challenged books. At the beginning she says that there are quite a few that you would expect to be on there that house explicit language and violence however, a book named And Tango Makes Three made its way up to the top of the list somehow.

            The children’s book Tango is about a penguin in the zoo that has two dads, in reference to the current debate on same sex marriage, it tries to teach a lesson. I think it’s considered a challenged book simply because it is a topic that is debated greatly and a lot of times people feel they can look down on you for your opinion on it. The author of the book decided that they would take on a story that implied that having two parents of the same sex was okay, and that was probably what alarmed people. Many people have the idea that if you raise a child in that kind of environment, they will turn out the same way, or be mentally unstable and I disagree. A child having two moms, would not make any different of an impact than them having a single mother take care of them, there’s just more support. There is far too much controversy over letting same sex couples live in peace together. In Pederson’s article, she tells a story about how her daughter wanted to know why one of her classmates had two moms, to which she responded that while Sam’s (her classmate) dad wasn’t in the picture anymore, his family found a way to make their situation work best. Next, her daughter just says “Oh, I get it.” And simply drops it. Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world that had minds as open to understanding, like children?

            Pederson ends the article by saying that you can either choose to acknowledge that people will live differently than you and respect that like Tango does or you can act like a bird of a different feather, an ostrich. With the slight background knowledge I had on ostrich’s I realized she was saying you can either be accepting or completely bury your head in the ground. I like that she bashes on people that are against Tango because being accepting and loving towards individuals is something that is truly so easy to understand and do, and somehow so difficult for many to process. This book is trying to teach the lesson that you can’t judge people for what they think or how they choose to live their lives and instead of praising that, we shut it down and make it near impossible to find in any bookstores, like the author also mentioned. In conclusion, I have to agree with the author that if you don’t have anything positive to say about the way people are living their lives, you ought to just stick your head in the ground, for I’m sure they’re not interested in hearing it.