You cover enough stories about a topic, and you see patterns. Take censorship, where a recurring theme is “The Delayed Freak-Out”: a play or work is used for months or even years without anyone bitching, until – BAM! one or more complaints from a handful of self-appointed moralists send a school district into a lather.

The play “Snow White in The Black Forest” had been performed previously at Robert Frost Elementary in Kirkland, WA before the principal and teachers demanded re-writes. Similarly, no one objected for years when high school students at Fort Madison High School in Fort Madison, Iowa performed Cotton Girls, a play by Scott Tobin in which three 18-year-old girls in 1950s America dish on premarital sex. Two days before a state competition, the school handed the teen actresses a redacted (read: censored) version of the script to perform.

After an outcry, Fort Madison High School relented, and the girls performed the play as written. No victory for free speech here, though. Superintendent Kenneth Marang says that he’d censor all over again, and only reversed course because the girls didn’t have time to memorize the changes. Some legal experts say that the precedent set by Tinker vs. Des Moines could’ve put the school in legal hot water, and that the performance of Cotton Girls outside of the school amounts to an unconstitutional restriction of speech.

Cotton Girls is still under copyright, but Google Books provides the first few pages of the play free of charge. Perhaps it gets racier, but this is the most “offensive” passage to be found:

COLLEEN. Yeah? So, what would you have us doing on graduation night?
BERRY. Things that we should be doing, like normal graduates.
COLLEEN. Like?
BERRY. Like driving around…I don’t know…driving around, drinking, laughing, going all the way with guys.
COLLEEN. Yeah? How’s that idea hit you, Miss? Going all the way with guys? What do you think of that?

MISS. Well, if you want to go driving around, we can go driving around. If you want to mess around with guys, I’ll drop you off.
BERRY. No. Understand that the most important thing is  that the three of us are together.
COLLEEN. That’s right.
MISS. Good then.

If Fort Madison High School officials believe 18-year-olds are talking so euphemistically about sex in the 21st century, perhaps this play isn’t the only thing stuck in the 1950s. Only one of the three girls in the play has “gone all of the way” with a guy. The actresses’ speech coach, Joe Harmon, describes it as a dialogue about sex that doesn’t “romanticize” free conjugation. This play is performed every year by high school girls around the nation; and – shocker! – some have won state competitions with it.

WTF, Iowa? What’s up with you guys and free speech? West Des Moines pulled the same shit several years ago with The Laramie Project. Perhaps the fault lies not in the plays, dear Iowa, but in yourselves, that you are such free speech ninnies.

censorship, education, free speech, iowa, school