The Toronto Public Library released a list of the seven titles that people have asked to be removed over the last year, and the moral outrage and pearl-clenching was definitely off the charts in terms of “Holy crap, you’ve got to be kidding.” Perhaps the most bizarre selection on this short but outraged list was the Dr. Seuss classic Hop on Pop, which uses a series of short poems and easy rhymes to help children better understand phonics.
However, if you only read the title of the book, it could be misconstrued as an instruction guide for children on how to abuse their fathers. That’s apparently how and why this was singled out to the Toronto Public Library for exclusion.
According to the complaint, Hop on Pop should be removed from the library for the following reason:
Encourages children to use violence against their fathers
And the only acceptable course of reparations would be to:
Remove from collection and issue an apology to fathers in the GTA and pay for damages resulting from the book
Basically, we are to believe that somewhere in Toronto, there’s a kid who only saw the title of this Dr. Seuss book and decided to leap onto his father’s belly, causing serious physical pain and enough emotional trauma for the man to then demand that no child be able to read this book for free ever again. But, as the library pointed out in its findings, the poem actually teaches kids that hopping on pop is bad, as it reads:
HOP POP We like to hop.
We like to hop on top of Pop.
STOP You must not hop on Pop.
But sure, I could see how kids could think this quick poem is actually reverse psychology. That must have been the problem, as the complainant’s kids are simply too smart and saw right through Seuss’s clever ruse, and they jumped on their father until his cries for help became low, pathetic, muffled sobs.
As for the other titles that received complaints, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy was accused of containing “falsehoods because it concludes Kennedy was killed by Oswald along”; A Kiss Remembered was deemed “obscene” because it “offends current societal morality”; Complete Hindi “contains inaccuracies and states that Hindi and Urdu are paired languages”; Flesh House is “shocking and disturbing”; the children’s book Lizzy’s Lion is “violent and disturbing”; and in my personal favorite complaint that I wholeheartedly agree with, the DVD copy of Adam Sandler’s That’s My Boy should be removed because it “shows sick and illegal behaviour and depicts it as humorous.”
Believe me, there’s nothing even remotely humorous about That’s My Boy.