Word: revs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...daughter of the Rev. Linwood Hanson, minister of the Baptist Church in nearby Byrant Pond, came home from the school and complained to her parents of "vulgar" content in her assigned reading. The minister and his wife sampled parts of the three novels and said they "were shocked." The Rev. Hanson branded the books as part of a "worldwide plot by Satan to teach young people to laugh at God," and resolved forthwith to get them removed from the school curriculum." I oppose their use on the grounds that they convey the idea that everyone lives like it says...
...THERE they are: a supreme book, a good book, and a superior book. Yet the Rev. Hanson said of them that literary value "may be hard to find." Furthermore, another of the Supreme Court's criteria for obscenity requires that a work be "utterly without redeeming social value," whereas each of these three works-literary quality aside-is clearly a document of unusual social significance and value...
...part, the Rev. Hanson pressed forward his campaign and launched a formal complaint with the Board of Directors of School Administrative District 44, which has jurisdiction over Telstar High. The Board voted sixteen to one to appoint an investigating committee. The sole dissenter, Richard Davis, based his vote on his blanket opposition to all kinds of censorship, adding that he had read the material in question and found it "in line with the literature being published today...
Subsequently the Committee met with the Rev. Hanson and four of his supporters. This quintet aimed most of its artillery at the second book, The Emperor of ice-cream. Particular objection was voiced (1) to the protagonist's "irreverent" references to a statue and to his mother's religious values; (2) to the "gutter language" and reference to various anatomical organs: and (3) to two admittedly unconsummated sexual scenes that, it was felt, "could not help but sexually arouse children and adults alike...
After some discussion, the Rev. Hanson stated that the book was not "the real problem." What needed changing, he claimed, was the entire "humanities" approach of the English department, an approach that "poses many questions, but does not present answers." The minister went on to claim that "this humanistic approach presents a 'false God.'" and that "Telstar might go the way of many college campuses toward socialism and communism" (shades of the earlier Blue Hill fracas...