by Curmie
[It turns out that Curmie and I were writing about the same issue more or less simultaneously. Shortly after I posted “The Great Stupid: Child Abuse Edition,” Curmie sent me this installment of his periodic column, expressing concern that it was redundant. It’s not, and I’m putting up Curmie’s take for several reasons: 1) I love his writing and style; 2) he approaches the incident from some different angles than I did; 3) I believe this incident is an important one that involves many critical ethics problems: the public school disaster; hypersensitivity to racial offense, real or imagined; the indoctrination and intimidation of children; and more. The plight of J.A. is not just the metaphorical canary dying in the mine, but strong evidence of just how badly our society’s air is poisoned. It is worth more than one post. Finally, I especially want this essay read after Curmie commented recently that he disagreed with my analysis on “countless” topics. In fact, I find that his values and ethical navigation equipment are closely aligned with mine. If they weren’t, he couldn’t have dissected this story so expertly.—JM.]
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A few days ago, I commented on Jack’s post on the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”
I hereby retract that characterization. It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive. So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money.
The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents wouldn’t accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.
More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one. We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.
I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not. There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—”boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.
Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above. That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so. Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate. It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes. I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A. But that, of course, is irrelevant.
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Ethics Alarms 