ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, June 5, 1996 TAG: 9606050061
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
AS A matter of principle, we opposed the much-publicized decision last month by Bedford County school officials to confiscate a Rush Limbaugh book that a student was perusing, evidently with parental permission and without disrupting classmates, during a recreational reading period.
We still think the decision was a mistake. But we note with sadness that, for minutes on a federal witness stand this week, the kid was unable to get through, without struggling and stumbling, even the first sentence of a page in the book that sarcastically discusses condom-bungee-jumping.
This spectacle shouldn't have affected the court's opinion in a lawsuit brought by the boy's father. The teacher, after all, took the book on the basis of the references to condoms - not because its language was too difficult for the fourth-grader. It was the possibility that the student might comprehend the subject matter, not that he couldn't, that appeared to motivate the confiscation.
Still, the kid's plight in court adds to the pathos of a case in which a child's education is temporarily taking a back seat to politics because of his teacher's decision to seize a book and his father's yearning to seize the limelight.
LENGTH: Short : 31 linesby CNB