NCAC Staff

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: The Arts Under Attack: The Philly Flasher Succumbs to Censors in Tennessee   Fall 1997 Frontal nudity in art, especially male, even of children and even in a non-sexual context, offends some viewers in degrees ranging from discomfort to actual revulsion. Others can appreciate such images for their aesthetic qualities or lack thereof and can [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: Fall 1997

NCAC Censorship News Issue #66: Summer 1997 As the controversy over the new tv ratings system heats up, so does the question of whether government initiated ratings comprise censorship and if the Federal Communications Commission can limit free speech. Dissatisfied with the "voluntary" ratings system developed by the television and entertainment industries, Congress initiated proposals to impose a government-sanctioned rating [...]

Censorship News #66

NCAC Censorship News Issue #66: Summer 1997 In a stunning rebuke to overzealous prosecutors, the owner and manager of Bellingham, Washington's Newstand store were awarded $1.3 million for prior restraint and for retaliatory prosecution by a U.S. District Court in Seattle. The judgment was awarded to Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand, who had been charged with obscenity for selling a [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67:

by Joan E. Bertin

Here we go again. A parent complains about a book used in her son's reading class, so the superintendent takes it off the reading list. This happened even though the book has earned praise from librarians and educators, the teacher thinks it's a good teaching tool, a faculty committee agreed with that judgment, and most of the kids like it.

Groups and individuals have long campaigned against overzealous government classification of documents in the name of "national security," for impeding the interchange of ideas about government actions and policies that are necessary to a democratic society.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #65: Much discussion about the Internet focuses on its purported dangers to children, with little attention to its value as an educational and informational resource. In an Orwellian bit of legal reasoning, the Justice Department now argues before the Supreme Court that the federal law restricting "indecent" material on the Internet is necessary to protect free [...]

In a decision that affirms the right of students to learn, the Colorado Court of Appeals ordered the Jefferson County School Board to reinstate the high school teacher they had fired for teaching Bertolucci's film, 1900.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #68: Winter 1997-1998 The challenge to New York City's new zoning law has now reached the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court (Hickerson v. NYC). The ordinance restricts access to adult entertainment establishments—bookstores, video stores, theaters and clubs devoted to sexually explicit but constitutionally protected fare. The legislation is troubling because it is broad enough [...]

NCAC Executive Director Leanne Katz, addressing the Hofstra University Symposium on Law and the Arts in October, expressed concern that some legal academics may be contributing to the worsening climate for the arts in this country.

Artist Robyn Bellospirito's work, including three contested paintings, was displayed at the Manhasset, New York library in 1996. The exhibit had been cancelled in 1993 for violating the library's "no nudes" policy.

Rather than allow 5th and 6th graders to read about the Big Bang theory in Discovery Works, a Silver, Burdett and Ginn science textbook, the school superintendent in Marshall County, KY had the offending pages glued together.

There seems to be a strange campaign afoot to remove the S-word from our lexicon. Its perpetrators seem to believe that if no one mentions "it," adolescents won't know or think about it and therefore, won't engage in it.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #64:

Rib Lake High School in Wisconsin is in trouble again. Rib Lake is where censorship actions surrounding Judy Blume's book Forever resulted in a costly judgment (Dishnow v. Rib Lake) against the district (Censorship News 62).

High school teacher Cissy Lacks was awarded $750,000 by a federal court in a case against a suburban St. Louis school district. Lacks was fired by the Ferguson-Florissant Schools for failing to censor her 11th grade students' creative expression as part of a creative writing assignment in which she asked them to write as they speak. (A federal judge reinstated Lacks in August.)

President Clinton signed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which bans the production and sale of sexually explicit material depicting people who "appear to be" children.

The New York branch of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association has escalated a long-running attack on a human sexuality course at Nassau Community College into a campaign to replace college trustees.

Some of the most extreme planks of this election year's Republican Party Platform would leave the First Amendment in ruins.

In a Walker-Ames lecture at the University of Washington in 1956, Gerald W. Johnson, a Baltimore journalist and author, said this in a discussion of academic freedom: "There is one loyalty oath that every man in the teaching profession is compelled to take and the penalty for its violation is not the legal penalty of treason, but the damnation of his immortal soul...."

A suit brought against a publisher for allegedly aiding and abetting a triple murder by publishing a "how-to" manual for contract killers was dismissed in a federal district court.

Penny Culliton, a New Hampshire teacher who fought back against attempts to smear and ultimately fire her, has been reinstated by the Mascenic School Board following a decision of the state's Public Employee Labor Relations Board. The Labor Board upheld an arbitrator's previous award that had turned Culliton's dismissal into a one-year suspension.

After a long and excruciating censorship legal battle, officials in Cincinnati have been thwarted again. (Cincinnati is where an art museum and its director were prosecuted for exhibiting the photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. A jury acquitted them.)

  Issue 63, Fall 1996 National news spotlighted the rejection by the Hudson, Ohio Board of Education of The American People, a multicultural history textbook recommended by educators for high school use. But the Board's reversal of its action seems to have gone unnoticed outside of the state. Under pressure from a local religious group, the board first voted not [...]

"When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and -- eventually -- incapable of determining their own destinies."

When it comes to the Internet, many libraries are apparently not following the traditional and important principles of the American Library Association on patron access.

Composer Elliott Sharp has produced State of the Union, 146 artists responding to the presidential State of the Union address in 146 minutes.

When a parent demanded that Poetry in Black America be removed from school libraries in Okaloosa County, Fla. for "inciting violence," the Florida Coalition Against Censorship arranged for challenged poet Nikki Giovanni to speak with school officials. The board retained the book.

Two obscenity convictions of comic 'zine creator Mike Diana were upheld by Florida Circuit Court Judge Douglas Baird, as he dismissed a third conviction for advertising obscene matter. Baird's ruling declared that Diana's homemade comic books, Boiled Angel 7 and Boiled Angel Ate, were designed to appeal to prurient sexual interests.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a June hearing on the legislation which, if passed, could affect a wide array of constitutionally protected expression and chill creative expression in every field -- banning snapshots of babies in bathtubs and classical drawings, paintings, and sculptures, for starters.

  Issue 62, Summer 1996 by Fred T. Haley  In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel in federal court in Philadelphia struck down the provisions of the 1995 Telecommunications Act which would have restricted all on-line communications to ideas, images, and information deemed suitable for children. Finding the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, the three judges, in separate opinions, decried the [...]

Twenty-five years ago today, reporters, editors and owners of The Times stood accused in Federal court of treasonous defiance of the United States. We had begun to publish a 10-part series about the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page study of how four Administrations became entrapped in Vietnam -- progressively more committed and more frustrated than they dared at every stage to admit to the public.

An art exhibit, Love Makes a Family: Living in Lesbian and Gay Families, created to depict the diversity of families, was recently attacked in Amherst, Massachusetts by opponents who brought a lawsuit to have it banned from further showings in public schools. The exhibit includes photos and text about families that include gay children or parents.

In a continuing and costly saga, the Rib Lake, WI school district is still reeling from the censorship actions of its school board in 1993, although four of the seven members and two administrators have since been replaced. When school guidance counselor Mike Dishnow was fired for criticizing the school board's banning of Judy Blume's novel Forever, Dishnow sued the district for violating his First Amendment rights and won an award of almost $400,000 including his legal fees (Censorship News 61).

A judicial hearing officer ruled in March that Denver-area high school teacher Alfred Wilder cannot be fired for showing Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 to a senior class studying logic and debate. While the epic film on the rise and fall of Fascism is over 4 hours long, officials of the high school created a 24-minute videotape of strung-together excerpts taken out of context to discredit the film and the teacher. Curiously, however, under Colorado law, the ruling is only advisory -- the school board now has twenty days to decide whether to accept her ruling.

A divisive campaign is snowballing around the country. It wrongly assumes that educators and parents are adversaries and books are the enemy. Watch for this campaign in your state; it's a camouflage for censorship!