Sex Hysteria!

This has actually been in the news for several days, but it’s not sex related, so I hadn’t intended to post about it.  I have changed my mind.

When the kids at Flagler Palm Coast High School wanted to perform the play, To Kill a Mockingbird, an apparently anonymous “school committee” shut the idea down because the play uses “a racial slur”.  The racial slur in question is the word “nigger” or, if you’re a member of any mainstream media outlet “the N-word“.

Keep in mind as you read the following quote from the Daytona Beach News-Journal that the person commenting leads a mentoring program and was one of those who recommended canceling the show:

John Winston, who said he’d spent the last five years “in the trenches” at the district, said he was disgusted with the news media’s coverage of the issue. The press has painted the show’s cancellation as a censorship issue when it is not, he said.

“It’s not about the ‘N-word,’ ” he said. “It’s about education.”

Well, here’s a wake-up call for you, Mr. Winston.  Yes, it is censorship and yes, it is about the so-called N-word and your comments to the contrary insult the intelligence of everyone they’re directed at.

Why is it that people who work with kids and should know better, always underestimate their intelligence?  Not only are kids probably far better able to handle the play’s language than the adults, they are almost certainly able to see that what’s being passed off as “concern” is really irrational paranoia.

Here we have school officials banning a play that condemns racism and then can’t even bring itself to utter the very word they are banning it for, as if the mere arrangement of letters, absent any negative context, can cause harm.  By this process, the school is training their students in the art of being perpetually paranoid about saying or writing the wrong thing.  They are teaching children to feel as if they must walk on eggshells in everything they say, because someone somewhere might be offended.

That educators don’t understand the rudimentary concept that words are simply tools of communications is stunning.  Absent any intent on the part of the speaker to offend, words do not have the power on their own to offend.

In the 16th century, upon the condemnation of nudity in religious art by the Council of Trent, a painter named Daniele da Volterra was commissioned to paint clothes on the nude figures of Michelangelo’s art in the Sistine Chapel.  That painter will forever be known for that act.  Likewise, Mr Winston and his fellow committee members have established their own legacy of idiocy.