We Tried — And Failed — To Identify The Most Banned Book In America | FiveThirtyEight

"There was a moment, about nine years ago, when Peter Parnell knew the children’s book he had co-written had entered the cultural zeitgeist. In the ThreatDown section of Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central show, Colbert held up a copy of “And Tango Makes Three,” Parnell’s cute and uplifting take on two male chinstrap penguins that had started raising a chick together at the Central Park Zoo, and satirically supported a Missouri library’s decision to move the book out of the children’s fiction section. “It’s all just another part of the homosexual flightless waterfowl agenda,” Colbert said....

Every year the American Library Association releases its list of the top 10 most frequently challenged books in America. It’s the kind of ranking that generates hundreds of news articles upon its release, according to Nexis records. When the 2014 list came out in April, the Telegraph wrote that Parnell and Richardson’s book “continues to cause a furore for ‘promoting a homosexual agenda’.” The Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and CNN all covered the news. The ALA itself has several press releases devoted to the list, along with a shareable infographic and an entire section of its website. One of the links in that section is a statistics page, which breaks down the challenges by reasons, initiator and institution...."