Posted on 05/06/2014 7:33:36 PM PDT by massmike
A reading assignment has some parents in New Hampshire confused and upset.
The controversial book “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult is required reading for some 9th grade students at Gilford High School. The book is a fictional story about a school shooting and has been part of the curriculum since 2007.
School officials say that the book contains important themes, but parents say that message is overshadowed by what some call pornographic content on one page. The book was assigned to students last Monday, but the school failed to give parents of freshmen students notice of the sexually explicit content in the novel. One page of the book contains a graphic description of rough sex between two teenagers.
Some parents are outraged, and attended a school board meeting to make their feelings known.
William Baer, whose 14-year old daughter is a student at the school, was one of the parents who spoke out at the meeting. He was promptly arrested for doing so:
Baer, who is an attorney, told EAGnews that the school “has no business introducing such themes” to students, and questioned why it is acceptable for “the state, through its schools and agents,” to mandate reading and discussing this kind of material.
In a written response to EAGnews, Gilford school leaders admitted they didn’t warn parents of the book’s controversial nature like they have in previous years, and promised to send a letter to the home “of all students who are currently assigned the book.”
It’s a little late now, isn’t it?
The incident at Gilford isn’t unique: reading assignments that contain pornographic material seem to be more and more of a “normal” occurrence, especially since the introduction of Common Core curriculum in schools.
In his article Sex and the Public Schools, Michael Snyder discusses ways schools are sexualizing our children at younger and younger ages. Some public schools are mandating sex education for kindergarteners. Earlier this year, a middle school in Kansas decided that adding anal sex, oral sex, and touching were appropriate topics to add to their health class curriculum.
If your child must attend public school, you may want to pay close attention to the assignments they being given.
As for the how part, we used mailings, fliers, knocked on doors of voters, etc. Regular time tested campaigning.
If people don’t start making a scene now, when will it be acceptable? I believe the time needs to be now.
When? 30 days before the election when the absentee votes are out.
Owns his ass? It is going to be good little socialists like this who sit on panels who help determine whether he gets that life saving medical care.
I heard the interview with this guy--he was granted the waiver and was prepared to go his own way and be done. Until the permission slip to read the book came home. The school misleadingly said something to the effect of "the book contains unhealthy relationships". No explicit sexual imagery. Not soft porn. (and certainly not sophmoric, crappy, talentless writing to boot.)
In states he won by 100,000 or less, yes. Beyond that, there was too much of a spread. Florida and Nevada were super close. Wisconsin had larger than 100,000 vote spread, but it had known fraud. I'll throw that in. 45 votes. That would make it 251 Romney. Ohio or PA would have been needed as well. 165,000 vote spread for Ohio. 210,000 in PA. That's a lot, even with fraud. I'm sold that there's fraud, but was it enough to flip? I'm not sold there.
Maybe the spineless GOP-e should stop performing fellatio across the aisle on their liberal bffs and fight to win.
I agree about GOP-e. It only fights to win in primaries.
Tea Party's problem is that it bitches all the time but either doesn't make the effort to fight (or in some cases doesn't know how to fight). The tea party is unreliable.
Neither side's leadership knows how to win. That's why I'm so ornery on this stuff to everybody.
In a pure democracy, yes elections directly and immediately have consequences.
However, in a constitutional republic, with a bill of rights, and individual liberty protected by laws, it is not supposed to matter so much who is elected president or to the damn piss-ant school board. Our rights and freedoms are still supposed to be guaranteed.
That is what this man was standing up for. He has every right to make noise in the face of his parental rights being violated. He doesn't have to just sit back and say, "oh well, my guy lost" or "I'll wait till the next election and vote for someone else" . His rights are in effect now.
It is sad you treat elected officials as if they were warlords.
If the goal is to create a scene, this man did a good job. But if the intent was to try and reason with the board in hopes of changing the procedure, if not the substance of the reading materials, he failed miserably.
I get the impression that he thought he was going to bully the board into some sort of apology or policy change. Bad calculation.
Maybe. But what the educators deserve in this situation is pitchforks and torches, not merely rude interruptions.
Who authorized this assignment?
Why has no one been fired?
Why has no educator been charged with indecency with a minor? Or a number of other charges that should apply?
This is the same kind of normalcy bias that allowed the Nazi’s to take over.
A lot of people on this forum will be criticizing the manner in which we respond to tyrants all while the tyrants proceed to throw us into ovens. But by all means lets not do anything rude or disorderly.
Fair enough, and I surely don’t argue with punishment for those responsible at least for not giving fair warning. Even if that is what you are gunning for, you don’t do it by being loud and rude. The result is to pay attention to the how of what is said instead of WHAT is being said. Interrupting other speakers or not waiting your turn is not effective. The better tactic, in my view is to use calmly measured statements calling the educators to task for what they did, noting that the passage that causes the problem cannot even be read aloud in the meeting or published in any respectable newspaper, etc.
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