ProChoice IDEA - Summer/Fall 1997 Sex and the Censors Censorship of anything related to sex is on the rise. Here are some recent examples: The police in Oklahoma City seized copies of the Academy-Award winning film, The Tin Drum, after a local group complained about it and a judge called it "obscene." The Wall Street Journal reported that the new [...]
NEWSDAY Tuesday, August 5, 1997 What can explain the fact that The Tin Drum could win an Academy Award for best foreign film and Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, and be faced with the claim that it is "obscene" and "child pornography" in 1997? Were we all blind to obscenity and child pornography then? [...]
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." Alfred Wilder, an English teacher for 25 years, was dismissed for not obtaining prior approval to show the film about fascism, considered an epic, in his logic and debate class, and for other alleged infractions.
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.
Click here to download a PDF of Vonnegut's remarks on censorship and literature from a January 16, 1986 briefing on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, organized by NCAC.