‘Passages’ in school books aren’t worth bans

Obscenity and pornography have been a featured in court cases and laws across our country from nearly every state all the way to the highest court of the land. One stands strong even though it is over 50 years old: The “Miller Test” of Miller v. California, 1973.

The Miller Test gives us three criteria to judge speech.

■ Whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

■ Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.

■ Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

All three criteria must be met in order to deem a book to be obscene.

One could argue that in a book with over 250 pages, one or two paragraphs that might rile up a small group’s sensibilities is not looking at the entire work “as a whole.” Since these book-ban requests are occurring in public (government-funded) school libraries and the government is pushing the book bans there, it could be argued that this is a First Amendment violation of our students’ rights, no matter their age.

I am horrified to see the latest antics being pulled by a very small but loud group. Their latest publicity stunt was to read these “passages” aloud at a Seminole County School Board meeting Sept. 19. They were unable to accomplish their goal of being shut down by the board. Kudos to Seminole County Public Schools for not falling for the games that this small, yet vocal hate group tried to play.

Jennifer Dotson, Deltona