Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
What evidence do you have the politician is being disingenuous in their quote? No evidence yet presented bears any of that out. Comments have attacked them for deciding on "religious" grounds. Okay, how do you know they did that? Can you present evidence that shows this to be the case?
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What evidence do I have that the school board is acting from religious motives? How about the "evidence" that they examined a religiously-worded complaint instead of writing back a polite "I'm sorry, we don't base library selections on religious ideals. But thank you for your concern." Is that not a piece of evidence?
Perhaps you are arguing that ALL complaints must be examined extensively by the board? In that case, all productivity could be ground to a halt by a single person -- say, me, for example -- arguing that, say, every book in the library is offensive to Lord Xenu and must be examined for age-appropriateness. I'm sure the school board would quickly investigate my concerns in that case.
What "evidence" would you like presented? You've outlined this strange situation where the only way you will (apparently) accept "yeah, this might have been religiously motivated" is if the school board comes out and SAYS that. The fact that the Supreme Court has specifically ruled such behavior inappropriate will probably prevent the school board from openly saying that, though.
I am attacking them on religious grounds because:
1. Book banning does not occur in a vacuum. Slaughterhouse Five is on the "Most Banned Books" list BECAUSE it is frequently banned for religious reasons. The book has been banned for religious reasons so often, in fact, that the Supreme Court has had to rule on the situation. So when, say, Slaughterhouse Five gets banned, I'm not going to automatically assume, "Oh, they probably just didn't like the cover..."
2. The request to evaluate the book was openly and clearly phrased with religious terminology.
3. Several school board members abstained from the vote. I'm more likely to assume that they felt something was shady about the whole thing and wanted to distance themselves rather than "Huh. Must have been flu season."
4. At least one commenter has found an article saying that not all the board members READ the book. (I'm not going to look for it now.) That tells me that they were not deciding on the actual content, but rather on the perceived content as presented in the religious complaint in #2.
5. The board has followed this decision with a statement that they intend to ban all R-rated movies from the classroom. Since war/history movies are frequently rated R for violence, this indicates to me that the school board is not interested in education as a primary incentive. Since I grew up in a fundie environment that consider R-rated movies to all be sinful regardless of content, I recognize a dog whistle.
Please provide YOUR evidence that this wasn't a religiously motivated decision besides your repeated postings of BUT THEY SAID IT WASN'T PEOPLE. Otherwise, stop calling commenters illogical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
As I said, we have been discussing the reason for the review. This was not the reason for the ban. The stated reason for the ban was the R-rated issue (so to speak).
-Pie
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I'm going to say this once, very calmly:
The
stated reason is not necessarily the
real reason.
Nor is the stated reason necessarily the
only reason.
This is not hard to understand. People rarely do things for only one, stated reason. You MUST know this or you would not survive 2 minutes on earth.