People make my head hurt.
Some guy in Texas, Alton Verm, wants the book Fahrenheit 451 banned from his 15-year-old daughter’s school because it contains adult situations and crude language.
“If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
It’s sickeningly ironic, really. Verm wants to ban a book about book burning. But wait, it get’s better: this all happened during Banned Books Week at the end of September.
Not that over-protective Daddy gets any of this. He didn’t even read the book.
“He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain.”
You, sir, are a moron.
The girl is fifteen! She’s probably knows more about being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” and using God’s name in vain than you could learn from “looking through” a thousand books on such sordid topics.
Exposing students to the concept of freedom of speech and other intrinsic rights is way more important than shielding them from four-lettered-words. Especially when they already know more than enough about the latter and barely anything about the former.
[HT: Andrea]
1 response so far ↓
epimetheus // January 31, 2007 at 9:40 pm
That’s true. The classics are hardly good, wholesome fun. Lucky for Shakespeare his adult situations and crude language are obscured from people like Verm with 400 years of changes in English.
Like gas stations in rural Texas after 10 pm, comments are closed.