A Texas couple who donated $3 million to St. Andrew’s Episcopal school were released from their donor agreement after their demands that a teacher drop Brokeback Mountain from a non-mandatory reading list were not met.
This opinion piece in The Daily Texan is right on: “‘Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance,’ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] once said. Unfortunately, this idea seems to lack prevalence in America’s relationship with ‘deviant’ ideas – and by deviant, we mean anything straying a hair from the Christian right ‘norm.’ Teenagers are free to watch educationally-valueless MTV videos with nearly naked actors all but having sex on the screen – but give them access to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s emotional short story on gay love, and all of a sudden it’s “pornographic” and morally-corrupting.”