Politics of Harry Potter middle class, especially whenever Harry confronts his ludicrously dysfunctional and downright abusive adopted family, the Dursleys." The critic Anthony Holden wrote in "The Observer" on his experience of judging "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was very negative—"the Potter saga was essentially patronising, very conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain." A review in "The Guardian" echoed this interpretation and stated that "despite all of the books' gestures to multiculturalism and gender equality, Harry Potter is a conservative; a paternalistic, One-Nation Tory, perhaps, but a Tory
Politics of Harry Potter any of them to appreciate the books fully," "Don't ask, don't spell" a reference to the U.S. military's former policy on homosexuality, Don't ask, don't tell. These sentiments are mirrored by Jeffrey Weiss in his article, "Harry Potter and the author who wouldn't shut up", published in the "Dallas Morning News". The "Washington Post"s Michael Gerson says "tolerance is one of the main themes of the Harry Potter books. In a marvelous social comparison, lycanthropy is treated as a kind of chronic disease, with werewolves subject to discrimination as if they had AIDS." According to Philip Nel of Kansas State