Anti-censorship coalition urges Virginia governor to veto "Beloved" bill

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Freedom of speech?! That should only apply when I agree with something! If I don’t agree with it or like it, then it needs to be banned and censored to protect my feelings!!!

  • Sponsors of this bill and the whiny parent.
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So AP English classes are in high school. If you think that your kid isn’t learning about sex at that age somewhere other than you, then you must home school. Preventing a kid from reading a book that all their friends get to read will lead your kid to at least want to find out what’s in the racy parts that their parents don’t want them to read.

This seems like a law for parents who are uncertain about their ability to completely indoctrinate their kids, but have unshakable certainty that their dogma is important.

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When I was in school they had Shakespeare with some of the best lines cut out of the plays (“your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs”, “why you are sharp my lord tonight! Aye and it will cost you a groaning to blunt my sharpness”) why study them if you leave it out? In fact I don’t think you can get Hamlet at all unless you can read him verbally assaulting Ophelia like that.

Thank goodness they don’t have access to a bible or something. That has scary shit in it!

Or internet pornography. It’s just as well that doesn’t exist. We’ve got rid of that so now let’s get rid of literature. It’s for the best.

Think of the children. We wouldn’t want them to think for themselves now would we?

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Even Shakespeare is sexually explicit, and there is no nonexplicit alternative to Hamlet.

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And you can’t understand it without sex. Just like life really.

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Well, the demand for ‘non-explicit’ Shakespeare actually gave us the term ‘Bowdlerize’, after Good old Tom and his “Family Shakespeare”…

It’s a terrible idea, of course; but(as in so many places) The Bard arguably played a key role in coining a term.

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And Titus Andronicus makes Game of Thrones look tame by comparison. (Both have plenty of incest, rape, torture, murder, decapitation, mutilation, etc. but even George R.R. Martin didn’t have any of the characters seek revenge on their rivals by feeding them their own children.)

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When crazy people sell crazy to the other crazy people, things get weird.

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I hope the bill passes. It’s about damn time, too. Someone has to stop me. My class is virtually non-stop genitals, which is odd for Chemistry. God, I’m an awful teacher.

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AP classes are college level courses taught in high school. If your kid is smart and mature enough to take an AP class they should be able to handle some sexual content.

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I read all books assigned to my children. Except the textbooks, of course, because they are so horrible they make me want to stab myself in the eyeballs.

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I agree with this argument, but I know plenty of college students that don’t seem to be able to handle this sort of content either. (Ah, the joys of going to college as an “older” student …)

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Someone’s never seen the Lion King …

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Don’t give him any ideas…

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“Dicks! Dicks everywhere!”

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I tried that argument with a parent of one of my AP students about eight years ago.

The students had to read The Awakening (independently and write a paper) and one student’s guardian (aunt) decided to make her wait until she read it. The aunt balked at a couple of important plot points (don’t want to give it away) and her voice was really cracking over the phone, and I just decided that it wasn’t worth making this an issue. So I assigned Huckleberry Finn for her niece, which is what the other general ed juniors were reading, and a different prompt.

Thankfully, she didn’t make this a huge fight and the curriculum didn’t have to be changed.

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On the fifteenth hand, who gets to decide what ‘sexually explicit’ is? That goes down the same rabbit hole as pornography; “I can’t define it, but I know what it is if I see it!!”

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Me too. I’m not gonna let them hog all the good smut.

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ROT-13ed for spoiler
Lbh unira’g ernq pybfryl rabhtu. Gur erirny unfa’g pbzr lrg, ohg vg unf nyernql unccrarq. Fefyl.

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