- I have yet to figure this out. Teacher assigns a passing if mediocre novel about England during The Anarchy (Google it) that has some racy scenes. It’s for the summer reading list. For high school seniors. You know, the ones who are almost 18. Students have the choice to read a different novel on the list of they don’t want to read “The Pillars of Heaven.” And yet some parents still have to gripe. Guess what, Mr. & Mrs. Flanders? Your precious little snowflake has already read about sex.
- In local “I want to control the Internet” news, one guy wants to stop anonymous comments, while another wants to shut down a Dallas website because he finds it obscene. (Let’s hope the second guy never heard of goatse.)
Opening up the naming of the new 121 tollway to public input. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
This is one of the rare times I gotta diagree with you, Trey.
If the Follett book depicts scenes of “gang rape and violent sex acts,” that’s potentially hugely different from just some references to good ol’ fornicating. I’ve not read “Pillars,” but I have read other works by Follett – and he can be fairly sexually graphic in his prose.
I’m not a censorship nut, and I love to lampoon the Prudie Parent Patrol as much as the next guy. But this is a bit different. I think you need to clarify your position.
– If you’re taking a position that there should be ABSOLUTELY no “line of apprproriateness” when evaluating which literature to assign to 17-year olds, or…
– If you’re taking the position that it IS appropriate for 17-year olds to read about gang rape and violent sex,
… then fine. Not sure I agree, but that’s your opinion. But it doesn’t fit into the “it mentions sexy talk so we should burn it” genre of news stories.
The biggest problem I have is the students were given an optional book if they didn’t want to read it.
And yet the parents are still complaining.
Many years ago I taught high school English. One of the books we assigned in a class on contemporary literature was “Man Child in the Promised Land,” about growing up in Harlem of the 1950s. The book not only had sex, it contained graphic scenes of drug use. It was a view of the world that my students in a white Catholic High School would probably never see. Did they need to see it? No, not really. What they did get, however, was another point of view, perhaps a chance to understand why some people may be the way they are. It also allowed them to see that such circumstances could be overcome. Indeed the author of the book had done so.
A few years later I taught in Texas public school. I was dumbfounded that the administration actually allowed a student to miss reading “The Crucible” because they did not want her reading about witchcraft. I casually mentioned having taught “Manchild.” My department head turned white and said that I could never do that there.
I never had a parent complain at the Catholic school. They knew what their kids were reading, but were willing to trust themselves and the teachers to do a good job. Malcontents who would protest a book which their precious does not even have to read are, well . . . . insatiable malcontents.
1) By the time I was the age of these kids who are reading this book, I had already been sexually active 7 years. I would have yawned at the passages in question.
2) As for protecting the future of anonymous comments on the internet, that’s not in jeopardy. What’s about to get a wake up call is the anonymous slander that arrested development cyber thugs feel is the Apple of their IP address.
Don’t be saying Trey was a mercenary in Guam when he fire-bombed that temple.
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Per this valid case, when I want to accuse someone of a sexual crime or engage in online public assaults on someone’s character (i.e. honor), I’ll sign my name so your lawyer will have an easier time. The Supreme Court will agree; what constitutes slander in conventional print media applies elsewhere. I’m all for cyberspace anarchy until the line between jousting snark ‘opinion’ and anonymous Eterna-Googled malice became more blurred than the New York Governor’s vision. What’s that old maxim? With freedom comes responsibility? We’ve got a lotta little mama’s boyz whose daddy never explained that.
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Here’s what I want.
I want all the freedoms, efficiencies, low costs, and the immediate opportunities for my enterprise to morph like quicksilver into anything it needs to be to compete that the internet offers me but with total protection from all of the liabilities those freedoms, efficiencies, low costs, etc. carry with them. Liabilities like others trying to have the same things. Cause I was first.