When I was in junior high, we didn’t see sexually explicit material. We had to figure it out on our own. For those of us who were not straight or cisgender, it was difficult to process who we were and what we were about. It was even harder to explain it to our parents.
We did have obscenity: a church being bombed in Alabama; civil rights workers murdered for trying to register voters in Mississippi; students being harassed for wanting to go to school. Today, school children have to deal with the obscenity of mass shootings, while state legislatures like ours want to expand, rather than curtail, access to guns.
When my nephew, who is now 32, was in sixth grade, his father said to me, “We want to keep him innocent a little longer.†I suggested that he ask his son if he knew the lyrics to a popular song at the time by Ludacris. Of course, my nephew did.
A retired schoolteacher friend said that, if he could teach pornography to his students, at least they would read an actual book. Most kids don’t read books. If you want to worry, worry about the violence and bigotry they see on their phones every day. Worry about a presidential candidate who won big in West Virginia, talking publicly about how he treats women.
The Gazette-Mail ran an article about how a large percentage of teachers in the state are dissatisfied with their jobs. How much worse will this crisis be if teachers are threatened with jail time for having a book someone doesn’t like in their classroom?
And isn’t the Legislature’s job to pass a budget in 60 days? Why are they wasting time with this garbage?
