SCORE ONE FOR PARENTS
"We have a right and an obligation as educators to protect the children from sexual material that we deem to be age-inappropriate," explained Hauppauge, N.Y. school superintendent Paul Lochner after pulling Seventeen, Teen and YM magazines from a middle school library. Lochner acted in response to a parent who voiced concern about the magazines' explicit, inappropriate sexual material. Recent articles in the adolescent magazines discuss masturbation, pregnancy tests, and whether or not condoms work in hot tubs.
Spokespersons for the magazines still insist they are not trying to encourage teen sexual activity. Supt. Lochner worries about the mixed messages sent by teaching one thing in class and advertising another in the school library.
Though the school board of the community backed Lochner's action unanimously, the local chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union has attacked the school's action and the local teachers union is considering a legal challenge. A spokeswoman for the American Library Association (ALA) noted that Hauppauge is not the only school to have banned these three magazines. ALA opposes such action, believing choices of reading material should be left up to young people.
The Associated Press found one mother who said she wanted the magazines
in question to be available so that her daughter could read about things
"too embarrassing" to ask her mother. (Could she not provide
her daughter with a personal subscription?) Embarrassment is a deterrent;
shameless reporting desensitizes youth. A response from a 12-year-old reader
of Teen and Seventeen is a testimony to desensitization: "There's
nothing dirty with these magazines at all" (AP, 2/13/98).
[From FRC's "Ed Facts," 02/20/98]