January 26th, 2010 - MadHacktress
This comes straight out of the WTF files for me. I mean, if it were Texas it would still be bizarre but at least they’ve got their heads far enough up their asses – socially – to have this kinda-sorta make sense.
But California? Really?
Perhaps Massachusetts electing a Republican senator really was some sort of a Sign that up is now down and California is now a social-conservative haven. Was there an earthquake the slipped San Andreas into the bible belt?
So the meat of the ban is that the dictionary (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary), surprise surprise, defines “oral sex”. And it uses such graphic language as “oral stimulation of the genitals” – truly contentious. It should also be noted that the parent who launched the complaint that lead to the ban was volunteering in her son’s classroom when she came upon the definition; there’s just something icky to me about reading up on oral sex when in a fifth grade classroom.
Perhaps that’s something to look in to?
The move to include the more advanced dictionary – targeted at college-level readers – is that some of the students are reading at a college-level. It only stands to reason, then, they those students should be given access to learning materials that further their ability to learn. Doesn’t it?
Obviously no one is advocating a big fluorescent bookmark in the “O” section to draw attention to the term, but there are plenty of words that people could consider contentious in the college-level edition of this particular dictionary. For example: abortion, creationism and the n-word. All of which, it should be noted, come before “O” (again driving home the point: WHY THE HELL WAS THIS WOMAN LOOKING UP ORAL SEX WHILE SITTING IN A FIFTH GRADE CLASSROOM?!?!?! Creepy).
Now I’m usually the first person to say that news websites shouldn’t have comment sections on them. I just feel that it makes it way too easy for the stupid people to have their say (yeah, yeah, I’m for censorship of morons, if you’re one of them, feel free to piss and moan). But this is one comment that I absolutely love! It’s so rare a find I had to repost it:
Coming up next: ban the alphabet, since you can arrange the letters in it to spell all sorts of bad words!
Best comment ever (aside from the spelling error).
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