For one member of the elected Texas Board of Education, the bird’s color could have been confirmation of her suspicion that the picture book promoted Communism. But then again, Board member Terri Leo (R-Spring) didn’t actually read the book before suggesting that its author, Bill Martin, Jr., be removed from a third grade social studies curriculum’s list of examples of writers and artists who are significant to the cultural heritage of communities. (The list including Martin, Jr. appears as item 15(B) on p.17.)
In an e-mail to fellow board member Pat Hardy (R-Weatherford), Leo suggested that Martin be removed from the list because he had also written Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, which its publisher describes as “a daring attempt to reinvigorate the theoretical program of the radical left, anti-imperialist movement of the twenty-first century.” Leo apparently found Ethical Marxism by searching Martin’s name at Borders.com.
“She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ‘ … It’s a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,’ ” Hardy told the Ft. Worth Star Telegram. Throughout the revision process, Hardy has objected to the large number of individual names that the Board has added to the curriculum standards.
At the Jan. 14 meeting of the Board of Education, Hardy moved to remove the children’s book author from the list (in this video discussion, Hardy’s motion begins during minute 27.) “Bill Martin is an author,” Hardy said in explaining her amendment. “He wrote some children’s books: Brown Bear, Black Bear, something like that. I haven’t got it on my reading list. But he also has written some very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system, etcetera, etcetera, as adult books.”
February 8, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
On Thursday the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued two seemingly contradictory opinions involving student speech. Both cases involved students who had created fake online profiles parodying the principals at their respective schools. Both students were punished by school officials for their speech. Despite the similarities, however, the Court ruled one student’s rights had been violated while denying relief to the other student.
The first case is Layshock v. Hermitage School District, which involved high school student Justin Layshock’s MySpace profile in which he poked fun at the principal for being a large man. The profile featured several nonsensical responses, most involving the word “big,” to questions about the principal’s favorite things. Justin created the profile at his grandmother’s house, using her computer, after school hours. The principal did not learn about the profile because of anything that happened at school. Instead he discovered it while at home. In response to the profile, school officials suspended Justin for ten days, banned him from extracurricular activities and forbade him from attending his graduation ceremony. Justin and his parents, along with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, subsequently sued the school for violating Justin’s First Amendment rights.
Yesterday, the Layshocks won that battle. A unanimous three-judge panel declared that the school’s actions were unconstitutional because they punished Justin for exercising his free speech rights. “It would be an unseemly and dangerous precedent to allow the state in the guise of school authorities to reach into a child’s home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that they can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities,” the Court noted. Justin’s suspension violated his First Amendment rights because his speech took place off campus and did not disrupt the school’s operations. As such, the school did not have the authority to punish him.
The second case,J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, was based on a similar fact pattern but came to a very different result. J.S., an eighth grade honor role student, was suspended for creating an online profile featuring her school principal. The profile did not contain the principal’s name, only his picture, but did include comments about his sexual habits and inappropriate behavior toward students. J.S. and a friend created the profile while at home on her parents’ computer. After being suspended for ten days, J.S and her parents, again along with the ACLU, decided to sue the school district for their violation of J.S.’s free speech rights.
February 5, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
A Jefferson County Public School student was banned from mentioning the name of his website in a Search Engine Optimization class offered through the school’s online continuing education program. His URL: www.olbastard.com. His context: he sells bastard files.
He attempted to post comments to the online forum, but because his URL was the subject of his questions, his posts were blocked due to use of “profanity.” NCAC sent a letter to the school, explaining:
While we sympathize with the goal of discouraging gratuitous profanity or disruptive comments in the classroom, removing “bad” words mechanically with no consideration of context or meaning itself disrupts the educational process. In this case it has caused serious harm to the student, preventing him from learning in the course. It has also displayed the imprecision of the web filter.
The filtering mechanism used by Ed2Go would not only eliminate any mention of an acclaimed book like Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, it would censor a conversation about architecture or gemstones. To arbitrarily delete or block comments due to a word, while disregarding its meaning as used in context, interferes with students’ abilities to have open conversations within the context of the learning objectives set by the instructor.
The school has agreed to refund his tuition for the course. But what about the filters? Internet filters have traditionally blocked students’ access to information; it’s now clear that what students (adult students, at that) can post in the online classroom is also at risk.
February 5, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
Robert Frost Elementary in Washington State canceled the touring theatre-troupe Studio East’s production of the Emperor’s New Clothes and demanded several edits to Snow White and the Black Forest due to fears that students would imitate the bad behavior of some of the characters. The plays, according to the school, violate its Human Dignity Policy.
NCAC, in collaboration with several members of the coalition, worked with a local parent and sent a letter to Lake Washington School District’s Chief Schools Officer. NCAC executive director Joan Bertin writes,
The school has many tools available to inculcate the value of human dignity, but censorship is not one of them. Moreover, freedom of expression is itself essential to human dignity, as our Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognize. The ability to think and express oneself according to the dictates of one’s own conscience is the very essence of freedom, and freedom is essential to human dignity.
Rather than demanding that the plays be re-written to omit the “objectionable” parts, the school could encourage students to explore the characters’ behavior based on the rules and values taught in school.
February 3, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
Google has taken a firm position on censorship in China, yet, ironically, Google willingly and actively censors. It censors so as to conform to local laws, but it also censors deliberately and voluntarily by restricting speech on, for instance, YouTube (fully owned by Google). A recent example of the breadth of censorship YouTube practices is the removal or restriction of access to several videos, which have been exhibited in major art institutions, and whose creator is a pioneer of experimental film and video art.
The videos, by Amy Greenfield, an internationally exhibited artist, were removed by YouTube because their subject is the female body. As the artist – like many others – was using YouTube to host the videos she had embedded into her website, YouTube’s censorship resulted in her work becoming inaccessible even through her own website.
Greenfield is not a “pornographer” however you may define the term – quite the contrary – her work has been shown at MoMA and the Whitney and has received multiple prestigious grants (if in doubt, you can see the videos and judge for yourself – the links are below). Film scholar David Sterritt has said of her, that she is “…today’s most important practitioner of experimental film-dance” (Cineaste Magazine). Yet the mere presence of an unclothed female body was enough to make the videos unpalatable to YouTube.
January 29, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
School officials at Menifee Union School District temporarily removed copies of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition for containing graphic terms like “oral sex” after a parent complained.
(But as it turns out, the dictionary did not even contain this term…)
Nonetheless, NCAC executive director Joan Bertin explains,
Removing a book should be based solely on its educational value, not on whether a few parents think it is a good or bad thing. On that theory, you would only have ‘Dick and Jane’ left in the library … We don’t think it is a good idea to remove dictionaries. It is a dictionary; its value is neutral. This just boggles my mind.
A committee will be reviewing the dictionary (as they say, it takes an army) to decide if it should be permenently removed. “We always welcome the public’s comments,” says the district’s Public Information Officer Betti Cadmus. Oh good. You can call or write the district here and tell them how you feel:
January 27, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
Athey Creek Middle School in West Linn, Oregon has taught its eighth grade students a First Amendment curriculum for ten years, addressing the controversies surrounding commonly-banned books and reading the books in class. The unit drew no major criticism until early last month, when librarian and teacher Michael Diltz faced ire from several parents. He had written two common “obscenities” on the board and allowed students to say them aloud.
In an email message to parents, principal Carol Eagon explained that the use of the words “was meant to provoke student understanding and experience how words, taken out of context, can lose their significance. When taken out of context, an author’s words can move a community to ban that author’s book from a school library.”
In a comment on a School Library Journal article, Diltz said he did not read from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as alleged. Instead, he used a page from a pro-censorship group’s website to demonstrate how readers should not “be distracted by words when the greater meaning and message of the book is what they seek to discover.” Diltz does not say which page he cited, but this one on the group’s site exemplifies his point that a list of the profane words in Slaughterhouse-Five is a gross simplification of the meaning of the work.
By protesting the explicit use of the two words in class while dismissing the lesson’s intent, the objecting parents proved Diltz’s point. “There’s some irony there,” said district superintendent Roger Woehl.
Woehl has defended Diltz and the overall curriculum on banned books, but his two concessions—that Slaughterhouse-Five will never be taught, and that the teacher will not use profanity in class—are overkill. It would have been enough, as the school district also promises, to inform the parents about the curriculum before it takes place. That way, parents who object can choose to make their own children read alternate books, while the rest of the students remain able to take part fully in this important unit.
January 26, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
In an impassioned speech at the Newseum in Washington on January 21, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked countries who limit the free circulation of peaceful dissent and religious ideas on the Internet and those who use the Internet for the “darker purposes” of promoting violence and making sexual advances on minors. She also spoke about the increasing concern over cyberattacks. While admitting there are limits to online free speech that the US imposes, she presented these limits as universal, contrary to the unacceptable limits that are associated with repressive regimes:
All societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of Al Qaeda who are – at this moment – using the Internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are both growing challenges that the international community must confront together. We must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the Internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the Internet for peaceful political purposes.
Note that “hate speech” a type of speech still protected by the US Constitution is among the examples of outlining the limits of online speech. Hate speech is illegal in countries like France and Germany, but the US has not attacked them for that limitation of free speech. It appears there is no question regarding the wisdom of restricting free speech online (copyright restrictions, surveillance, Internet filtering in public libraries and schools, bans on obscene material, these are all US phenomena) but also the conviction that OUR restrictions are good and reasonable, and theirs are bad and unreasonable. Maybe so, but let us, at least, be aware that a desire to impose our rules no matter how good they look to us on the rest of the world can be put into question and that any claim for “universal validity of government regulation” has to be taken with a grain of salt.
January 22, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Anatole France
Even for true believers of the First Amendment, the decision in the latest campaign finance case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, raises difficult issues. (For a press report on the decision, click here. For an analysis of the decision, click here. For reference to multiple commentaries on the case, click here)
In a 5 – 4 decision, the Court struck down restrictions on expenditures for political campaigns by corporations and unions. The decision accords such organizations a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts to get their political message across, to advocate for specific candidates, and to influence the outcome of elections. Justice Kennedy is eloquent and passionate about the importance of the First Amendment, language that is heartening to First Amendment advocates and will no doubt be cited to defend free speech rights in a variety of other contexts. The decision will of course benefit institutions with different opinions and perspectives. Indeed, many non-profit organizations that want to inform their members and the public about political candidates urged the Court to reach this result.
But the dissenting opinions raise troubling questions about the effect the decision will have on the integrity of elections, and whether the result will be to privilege the voices of the rich and powerful. These questions reveal a problem largely avoided by the majority – that granting moneyed interests unfettered free speech rights necessarily undermines the ability of those with less means to be heard. The First Amendment rights of some to influence the electoral process have been vindicated, but the rights of others to participate equally in the conversation have been largely ignored.
This case is part of a trend in which the Court is increasingly protective of corporate speech rights, while simultaneously cutting back on the speech rights of individuals, like students and government employees. An important principle may have been upheld in this case, but the fact that only some will benefit from it remains profoundly disturbing.
Check out our previous commentary on First Amendment challenges to campaign finance laws. For contrasting views of the decision from First Amendment advocates, compare this with this.
January 22, 2010 by Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship
It is, literally, an old story. In the legend of the boy and the snake, a venomous snake asks a boy for help, and promises not to bite him. When the snake bites the boy despite his help, and the boy asks why, the snake says, “because I am a snake.”
The boy in the story learns an important lesson: despite the snake’s promises, in the end the snake behaves as his nature dictates.
Google has recently learned the same lesson. Before 2005, Google’s Chinese presence was limited to a Google search page in Chinese, www.google.com/intl/zh-CN. But this site (which still exists) was frequently blocked, or returned incomplete results, for users in China; apparently the result of the so-called “Great Firewall,” known officially as the “Golden Shield Project”: the technological and human processes that the Chinese government uses to control users’ access to Internet content from outside the country.
As Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president for global communications and public affairs, told a Congressional committee in February 2006,
Our search results were being filtered; our service was being crippled; our users were flocking to local Chinese alternatives; and, ultimately, Chinese Internet users had less access to information than they would have had.
There are ways around the Chinese government’s Internet restrictions, and the restrictions themselves are often faulty. But the vast majority of Internet users in China can only access material cleared by the government filters.
The National Coalition Against Censorship is dedicated to protecting rights and principles guaranteed by the First Amendment. We report on incidents of censorship and provide support and resources to people facing challenges to freedom of inquiry and expression.
In the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, the title character answers the question of the title with, “I see a red bird looking at me.”
