Piling on Kansas

I'm a little late to the party here, but apparently there's a parents' group formed to fight indecency in required reading in schools in...Kansas. In the town where I went to high school. In the district that granted my high school diploma. The RudePundit, as always, gives an eloquent treatment of the subject which I can't hope to equal, so I'll just link to it here. If you want to visit the home page of the parents' group, you can find it here.

So here's the deal. I do not have, nor do I hope to ever have children. I'm just too irresponsible, and my spawn would likely inherit the chemical imbalance that makes me depressed and anxious and prone to compulsion, a fate I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. I can, however, understand wanting to protect your kids from scary bad things that make them uncomfortable. People do and say bad things in those books. But guess what, people do and say bad things all around us. It's just that when it happens in the real world, it usually isn't rendered as beautifully or as powerfully as it is in a novel by, say, Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison. I can only assume the parents are worried about some sort of bad influence from the characters in these books, but holy shit, these are BOOKS and the characters are FICTIONAL. The school isn't there to teach you how to get into heaven. Presumably, school exists to help you develop thinking and analytical skills, and to expose to you to new things like the works of black women writers.

I also think it's hilarious that the parents have this huge disclaimer about Shakespeare saying that it is somehow more moral and 'cleaner' than all this dirty stuff the kids are being forced to read. My question is, have they ever really read Shakespeare? I mean, really, really read it? There are passages lewd enough to make me blush, and I plan to talk about anal fisting in my cataloging presentation next week. So I guess reading books for school is all about moving your eyes over profanity-free passages. It's not about seeing how different authors use language. It's not about gaining access to some larger culture or society or awareness--call it what you will-- which has shaped our society and our culture. (The Simpsons is like, chock full of references from A Clockwork Orange and the works of Tolstoy.)

The best part of the parents' group site is the comments, of course. There's a lot of 'us against them' going on in the comments, but here's my favorite comment:

"Go to the American Library Association ALA site and read their policy www.ala.org. It provides "NO" restrictions, all ages can access all materials. This is what librarians and English teachers believe."

Oh. My. God. Freedom of access. For anyone. To anything. Parents might actually have to, like, keep an eye on their own kids, and teach them right from wrong so the recognize it when they see it. But then again, the ALA isn't building websites that allows kids to access all the swear words in a particular book by clicking a link.

A colleague (formerly of Johnson County) pointed out to me last night over a large volume of Scotch that there vulgarity, profanity and obscenity refer to different things. Fascinating.

My good friend Boba Fett points out that even though Kansas is catching all the flak for stuff like this, it's happening everywhere, and she's 100% right.