ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, May 25, 1996 TAG: 9605290020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
TO TOM Gardner, who is fighting Bedford County schools over his son's right to read Rush Limbaugh in class, we say: Right on.
Letting the 9-year-old peruse Limbaugh's "The Way Things Ought To Be" poses far less corruptive risk than confiscating the book, as a teacher and principal at Montvale Elementary did last week. When educators, for heaven's sake, are inadequately attuned to the perils of censorship, all of us are in trouble.
But wait. "Roanoke, Virginia, is a town I thought I owned," Limbaugh told his listeners. Whether they are owned or not, perhaps a few citizens tune in to his talk show less than daily, and so may have missed the nationwide on-air discussion of the Bedford incident. For them, a summary of events so far:
During a free-reading period in class, Jason Gardner was pursuing his civic education by studying the conservative commentator's book, which his parents had allowed him to take to school. Jason was reading in particular a section about "condom-bungee jumping" - a parody of a commercial meant to satirize distribution of condoms in public schools.
Upon noticing this passage, Jason's teacher seized the book and turned it over to the principal. Whereupon, rather than defend the kid's reading rights, condom parodies notwithstanding, the principal agreed with the teacher that the book was inappropriate, and called Jason's parents to retrieve it.
Whereupon Jason's parents, to their credit, did not acquiesce in this affront to the First Amendment, but protested vigorously - indeed, pursuing not just one but two popular means of dissent in America today: calling a radio talk show and filing a federal lawsuit.
The Gardners' case is unusual in at least two respects. Censorship more often is requested by parents who want to block their kids (and classmates) from reading books they find objectionable. In this case, the censorship originated with the school.
Censorship also is often sought by conservative groups opposed to the inclusion of certain materials in the curriculum - especially having to do with, excuse the expression, sex. In this case, Limbaugh and his supporters are protesting a teacher's exclusion of material with sexual content.
To call this an unusual case is not to suggest, however, that it is unconnected to other sorts of censorship attempts. Granted, censorship on the left, under the rubric "political correctness," threatens the republic at least as much as censorship on the right does. Even so, there's no question that, with Limbaugh prominent in the cheering section, conservative groups have jacked up pressure on schools across the nation to quash any references to sexual matters in the classroom. In-
deed, the point of Limbaugh's condom parody is to ridicule supposed excesses of sex education.
If some educators are more prone, as a result, to excessive sensitivity and pre-emptive self-censorship, that should not be surprising.
But neither should it be accepted without protest. Among the salient facts in this case: Sexual content is by no means a defining feature of Limbaugh's book. The work certainly isn't obscene. Gardner was reading it with his parents' permission, during a free-reading period. And there's no evidence he was disrupting classmates' learning while doing so.
If things were as they ought to be, says Limbaugh, Jason would have his book back. We say: ditto.
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