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.

Uncategorized censorship, education, free speech, iowa, school

There are days when I feel like simply duplicating everything that Ed Brayton posts. Today’s no exception. Go read all of Dispatches from The Culture Wars, but particularly this ditty about how Tennessee has approved a curriculum for teaching the Bible. Tennessee worked with a Biblical scholar in formulating the course, and claims it teaches the text objectively, without bias or promotion.

So what’s the trouble? First, individual schools have adopted or concocted courses on their own, and the state curriculum won’t necessarily replace them until somebody pitches a bitch. Second, while the course itself was calculated to withstand Constitutional challenges, a rep for the ACLU points out that it’s how the course is taught that will matter. Give this curriculum to a teacher who’s hell-bent on escorting souls to Heaven, and the materials won’t mean shit – it’ll become another avenue for converting a captive audience.

Third, Jeffrey Schweitzer at Huffington Post says the course isn’t objective at all. Outside of two readings in Genesis, he notes, the rest of the readings come from the New Testament. As Schweitzer says, teaching the Bible while ignoring the books core to Judaism “is a bit of an oversight.”

To build on Schweitzer’s point, it’s not like this hasn’t been done before. Five years ago, a non-profit released a high school Bible course formulated with input from both Jewish and Christian scholars. It tied the Bible into Shakespeare, American History, and the struggle against slavery. Why did Tennessee feel the need to devise a new course when other, better options already exist?

I’ve long believed that it’d be beautiful to teach comparative religion in schools. The two impediments are fundamentalists, who don’t want their kids exposed to nasty heathen religions, and the rest of us, who don’t want our kids exposed to fundamentalists. (Okay, to fundamentalism – hate the sin, Jay, not the sinner.) As Divers and Sundry notes, we already have enough problems with teachers injecting Jesus into biology classes.

We also have had more than our fill of fundamentalists who champion the freedom of their religion, while denying that freedom to others. Pagan and Wiccan students have suffered, India Tracy being just one example of how acrid the stench of bigotry can become. And consider the amount of shit that gets flipped whenever anyone tries to say anything positive about Islam in the presence of schoolchildren.

So, chalk me up as opposed. Maybe one day, when American culture is more tolerant of its own diversity, we can haz Bible courses. For now, I sympathize with the position of Barry Lynn from People for the American Way:

“At this time in America, it’s better to simply talk about religious influences when they come up during the study of literature, art, and history, and not take the text of one religious tradition and treat it with special deference.”

Amen, brother.

Uncategorized bible, christianity, education, paganism, religion, religious tolerance, school, spirituality, tennessee, wicca

“An abstinence program that works!” crow the latest headlines.

But what the sprog does “works” mean?

According to the town criers, a “non-moralistic” abstinence program has succeeded in reducing the number of sixth- and seventh-graders who have sex over the period of two years following the course. The researchers’ goal was not to convince students to wait until someone put a ring on it to do the deed, but to delay the transmission of STDs. The program they devised was careful not to stigmatize or vilify sex. The study observed that only one-third of all students who received the abstinence-only treatment had sex within two years following the study; nearly 50 percent of students who received safe-sex education took the plunge within the same time, and nearly 40 percent who received a combo abstinence/safe-sex course followed suit.

Which begs the question: will the 2/3rds who abstained in the first group practice safe sex when they do become active? Leaving kids without these tools as they grow into adults is asking for worse problems down the road. It’s a critical question, and one on which this study is mute.

That aside, the study makes a valid point, and educators ought to incorporate information about abstinence  into their comprehensive sex ed courses. But as Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake drives home, this study has nothing to do with the abstinence-until-marriage programs that were favored during the Long Dark Tea-Time of The Soul Bush Years. Advocates for Youth, which had high praise for the current study, assessed the impact that five years of abstinence-until-marriage education had on America’s youth in 11 states, and found the result was nil:

Evaluation of these 11 programs showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact. A few programs showed mild success at improving attitudes and intentions to abstain. No program was able to demonstrate a positive impact on sexual behavior over time.

A separate study by Mathematica Policy Research in 2007 reached the same conclusion. And of course, there was the shocking (and tragically amusing) study in 2005 that found that many teens who took abstinence pledges were defining abstinence down to include everything short of vaginal penetration. (“Vaginal penetration” makes it sound soooo sexy, no?)

If you search on abstinence on Google, you’ll find this story is overwhelming all of the other information on the history of safe sex programs, even though comprehensive sex education has been proven effective at reducing disease, limiting number of partners, and promoting safe sex. I can’t fault the CNN story, which quotes Advocates for Youth and describes the current study to a T. Yet if you didn’t dig more deeply, and stuck to the screaming headlines, you’d be convinced that evil liberals had pulled the wool over the public’s eyes for decades.

Not that anyone would be fool enough to argue that.

Sigh.

UPDATE: Check out Dan Savage’s “don’t believe the hype” post for more. Bill Donohue’s Catholic League is now all over this study like ants on spilled honey.

Uncategorized abstinence education, education, safe sex, sex, sex education

If it’s a numbered day between 1 and 31, then you can bet some parent, somewhere, is freaking out about their child being exposed to a discussion of girl parts. And why should January 29th be an exception? Raw Story alerts us (via the Culpeper, Virginia Star Exponent) that a single parent’s complaint about The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition led to the Culpeper County Public Schools replacing the book with, well, a less definitive edition. The offending passage? Anne Frank talking about her vagina:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

At least the school replaced it with a “less offensive” copy, rather than pulling the entire book. In 1983, the Alabama State Textbook Committee banned it outright – not just because of the sexual passages, but because it was “a real downer.” I’m sure Anne wishes her story had been more uplifting. Hitler, unfortunately, had other plans. But in a way, I’m more sympathetic to Alabama than I am to Culpeper County. How insulting is it to the memory of Frank that the Nazis hunting her family down like dogs is less offensive than her knowledge of her own body?

The absurdity of a single parental complaint leading to censorship boggles the noggin. This isn’t D.H. fucking Lawrence, people. In this passage, we have a young woman asking a question that has occurred to millions of other young women who were awakening to their own sexual identities. Where’s the “obscenity”? Culpeper might as well issue an injunction against their female students looking south of their waistline.

Theoretically, in the United States, obscenity is defined by an appeal to “community standards.” According to the Culpeper County Public School system,  their “community” consists of one angry parent with an email account and an ax to grind. Forget “where’s the obscenity” – where’s the debate?

Schools are supposed to educate their students about the world. Sad to see, in the 21st century, a school administration working overtime to ensure its students learn as little about the world as possible.

(H/T Jen Creer via Facebook)

Uncategorized anne frank, education, school, sex, sexuality

My output will likely be low today. I injured my wrist yesterday, and it’s hurting so bad that I’m going in to the ER to have it x-rayed. I can barely rotate it in either direction, and typing makes it throb. It sucks rocks. Not being able to type efficiently, for me, feels like gasping for air.

But I can’t fold for the day without mentioning the sanity radiating out of Shiloh, Illinois, where parents like Lilly Del Pinto are in a minor tizzy over And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins who raise a baby penguin together. So the parents are calling for the book to be pulled, right? Actually, no. All of the parents who object to the title agree that this would be censorship. They merely want some sort of warning about what’s in the title, so they can decide as parents whether their kids are “ready” for it. Other schools have moved the book to the nonfiction section, since it’s based on a true story, in order to quell “Homosexual Agenda” objections.

Well…shit. That’s perfectly reasonable. Come on, guys…are you sure you don’t wanna burn it? Or at least singe the edges a bit? Help me out here – you’re depriving me of material!

Personally, I think these parents are a touch silly not wanting their kids to learn about alternative families – especially if such families exist in their district. But they’re not being flaming assholes about it. As a fellow parent, I understand their desire to gate the information their kids receive.

Is this a sea change in the way gay and lesbian parents are perceived? Well…maybe not. After all, there are still religious bigots like Steve Walden floating around out there:

This book made me angry because it forced a questionable sexual practice on my children, passing it off as something as legitimate as their own family. It attempts to normalize something clearly abnormal. Penguins, like all other creatures, mate primarily for procreation. The fact that the keeper had to steal an egg from another couple to make a “family” shows that same-sex couples by themselves do not have what nature requires for them to conceive and bear children.

You’re right, Steve. They don’t have what it takes to conceive and bear children. But since when is parenting about the rubbing together of body parts? There are plenty of parents who can fuck and pop out sprogs; too many of them turn out to be monsters who terrorize their young. Biology does not guarantee morality, kiddo.

And since when is a relationship between two people reducible to a “sexual practice”? Is your marriage to your wife all about the relationship between your cock and her pussy? For people who bleat on constantly about gay folk being sex-obsessed, you sure are quick to reduce love to nothing but the bumpin’ of uglies.

Steve could take some sanity cues from the parents in Shiloh. You don’t want to expose your kids to the reality of gay parenting? You want to keep your children ignorant and intolerant? Personally I find that abusive, but it’s not a choice we can prevent you from making. What we can stop you from doing is foisting this limited view on the rest of us.

(Oh, and Steve? The penguins aren’t “ex-gay”, as you assert. We call that switch-hitting. Have you people seriously never heard the word “bisexual”?)

Uncategorized censorship, education, glbt, parenting, school