“So, dear honors biology students of Gilbert, Arizona, I now address your directly. You may soon find yourself holding a biology textbook with a hole where some true facts used to be. Don’t despair. We here at ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ have preserved the part of your biology textbook that the crusading religious group and the Republican state senators and the conservative majority on your school board no longer wants to allow you to see.
“We’re going to keep it posted for you in perpetuity at ArizonaHonorsBiology.com, which we bought today so that we could post the page that they’re cutting out of your textbook. You can get it there. ArizonaHonorsBiology.com.”
At least in the face of morbid politicking, we have the relief of morbid humor.
Steve Benen, in addition to expressing his amazement at the situation in Arizona, notes:
Apparently, in 2012, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed into a law a measure that requires public schools to present childbirth and adoption as preferred options to elective abortion.
What’s wrong with that? In Gilbert, the honors biology class uses a textbook with a page that told students, “[C]omplete abstinence, avoiding intercourse, is the only totally effective method of birth control.” The same page includes information – rather clinic information – about the morning-after pill and medically-induced abortion. The procedure, the text says, “requires a doctor’s prescription and several visits to a medical facility.”
The state Board of Education and its lawyer said the paragraph in question isn’t a problem – it doesn’t advocate or encourage abortion – but apparently that didn’t matter. Conservative activists and local Republican officials insisted the textbook is illegal under the law created by Brewer two years ago.
As a practical matter, they conceded that the textbook pre-dates the Arizona statute, and that the school district can’t just go out and buy new textbooks because of one paragraph the right finds objectionable, so in the interest of expediency, conservatives want to “excise” the offending page – which is to say, they want to literally tear out the page that mentions abortion from the book.
Remember, these are “honors” students, for whatever that designation is worth in Arizona.
Not worth a copper in the Copper State. The grandest of canyons is between the censors’ ears.
Oh, and that link Maddow mentioned? ArizonaHonorsBiology.com? Yeah, go ahead and click. It does, indeed work, redirecting the reader to AZ Central, where the Arizona Republic has posted a copy of the page some officials in Arizona have deemed honors biology students too stupid to be allowed to see.α
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α As hyperlinks to news sites are not the most reliable—this isn’t the Beeb, after all—we will do our part and preserve a copy to last as long as this blog does.
Maddow, Rachel. “School board to rip out textbook’s abortion mention”. The Rachel Maddow Show. msnbc. 31 October 2014.
Benen, Steve. “Arizona law leads to ‘edit’ of biology textbook”. msnbc. 3 November 2014.
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