PORN SCHOOL, by Charles Carreon
04/19/09
You got kids? Or friends or relatives who have kids? You know, “kids” – those little people who haven’t grown up to be unemployed yet? When you’re a parent, you don’t have much choice about what to do with them during the daylight hours, when they’re not at home watching TV, playing video games, or posting to their mySpace page. You have to send them to school, so they can learn to follow the rules, how to fear authority, how to cower in the face of peer pressure, and how to experience increasing anxiety as testing day approaches and the time for procrastination diminishes. Without these skills, they will be naked before the world, and they may suffer disorientation when they see thieves rewarded with more money to steal, bullshit-artists turned into world leaders, and people who eat worms on television turned into reality stars.
And as a parent, you accept all this. You go to work yourself, if you can find it, and entrust your children to a claque of people called teachers who quack like ducks and reward the best quackers with high grades in quacking, and quack about how nice the quacking sounds when all the students quack in unison, and how cacophonous it is when they quack randomly and out of order. You accept all this, and you even pay taxes and school bonds so the teachers won’t go on strike and quack at you about how hard their jobs are and how mean kids are and how teachers just don’t get any respect.
But I tell you what you don’t do. You don’t expect your kid to come home and tell you that what they taught her in school today was how to strip. You particularly wouldn’t expect it if you lived in a Mormon community like Safford, Arizona, where the largest business is a Federal prison and the nearest strip bar is probably sixty miles away in Tucson across the street from the air base. But that’s what a couple of Safford parents discovered when their daughter came home from school one day a half-dozen years ago. She was just thirteen years old, a preppie kind of girl as she remembers it – a gentle little creature with tender feelings and a body just starting to turn to womanhood -- when she was called to the principal’s office and taught how to take it off.
There in school, where her parents couldn’t protect her, where those who were supposed to protect her had suddenly turned into sexual vampires indulging a sick impulse to leer and humiliate her, they made her take off her shoes, her skirt, her blouse, and then, they told to pull her bra away from her chest and move it side to side, and made her do the same with her panties. And oh, what were they looking for? Acid? Heroin? Crack? Crank? Switchblades? No, something far more dangerous. Something so dangerous, so likely to cause instantaneous derangement of the adolescent mind and senses that not a moment could be wasted. Yes. Ibuprophen.
Hey, don’t look at me like that! Ibuprophen is a powerful pain-reliever, just like Oxycontin and Vicodin, the drugs that turned Rush Limbaugh into the heartless monster that he is. Why do you think people take pain relievers, anyway? To numb themselves to the pain caused by injuring other people. It is hugely popular with bankers, politicians, bailout artists, and social vermin with inflamed consciences and headaches so big they just want to run away from their problems. So these Safford school administrators, they were combating an evil that might be too small for you to see, but they, being used to nipping trouble in the bud, were onto it early, protecting this young lady from herself, and protecting her schoolmates from her. Never mind that they found no ibuprophen – the word got around – there was no way to hide your Advil stash from these stern enforcers of adolescent virtue.
The good of the whole student body had to be considered. So when the young lady’s parents sued, the State of Arizona fought back – through trial, and appeal, and all the way up to the US Supreme Court – which is where it is now. That’s a lot of lawyer hours spent defending the right of school officials to get an intimate view of their students – a lot of taxpayer dollars – but once again, there are powerful factors at work that compel this type of government activity. I can hear Arizona's lawyer arguing right now: "It’s about the big picture, not just about one girl! This could open the floodgates of litigation, your Honor! It would incentivize parents to file lawsuits for money – filthy money – and expose the public treasury to being looted by every child who had to expose their genitals for the good of the school. And that would chill dedicated public servants in the performance of their duty to explore every nook and cranny when necessary to fight the scourge of Advil use now threatening the nation. Your values would have to be on upside down to not see where the real danger lies. After all, a young woman’s virginal assets aren’t tainted when viewed by people without prurient impulses, people who just want to find the Advil. But lawsuits – now there’s something dirty!"