This afternoon, Virginia State Senator D*** Black responded on Twitter to a Gwaker story about an email he recently sent to an AP English teacher about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Jessica Berg, the teacher, objected to State Senator D*** Black’s support of a (failed) bill that would require teachers to obtain parental permission to assign their students certain books. “If it’s so graphic that Gwaker can’t even print it for their adult readers,” he wrote, “then parents should have the right to know.”

When Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published, in 1987, Margaret Atwood, writing in the New York Times Book Review called it a “triumph.” She wrote of the novel, which has come to be considered one of the most important of the contemporary era, “[Morrison’s prose is] by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point.” A few weeks ago, writing in an email to an AP English teacher who is one of his constituents, Virginia State Senator Richard Black called Beloved “moral sewage.”