One eye-opening example comes from Hudson, Ohio, a city of 22,300 in the suburbs of Akron, where a high school class was assigned a controversial creative writing book as part of a college-level writing course. When the public learned about the book last week, school board members were told they should step down because they are ultimately responsible for what happened: Students are using a book that suggests violent, twisted, explicit and X-rated scenarios to write about.
“It has come to my attention,” Mayor Craig Shubert told the school board, “that your educators are distributing essentially what is child pornography in the classroom.”
That is because the writing assignment ideas --- they are referred to as “prompts” --- include writing “an X-rated Disney scenario;” writing “a sex scene you wouldn’t show your mom;” and writing a church sermon created by a “beloved preacher” caught in a sex scandal.
The creative writing book is called, “642 Things to Write About.”
Shubert went on to tell the school board a judge has told him the writing assignments meet the definition of child pornography, and for that he demanded the school board and high school officials should resign or be charged.
The school board confrontation was first reported by The Daily Wire, which says Mayor Shubert’s school board meeting appearance was followed by angry mother who said she learned about the book from her daughter. A police officer spoke next and demanded the school district install cameras in the classrooms.
Monica Havens, the mother of a high school senior, read off the writing prompts, which include drinking beer and fantasizing about murder, to the school board. She said her daughter retrieved the book from her backpack after the mother asked her about a book with “inappropriate” stuff.
Reacting to the book controversy, Linda Harvey of Mission America agrees with the City of Hudson mayor that the book’s content qualifies as obscenity.
“And if it's not a violation of the Ohio state law right now,” she says, “it should become one.”
The controversy in Hudson took an interesting turn just two days later, however, when news website Cleveland.com reported the writing class requires parents to sign a consent form acknowledging the students will study “adult themes” as part of the upper-level course.
That story included an interview with the same mother, Monica Havens, who acknowledged she had “signed off” on the class knowing there would be adult material.
“I am okay with adult content, but I guess it depends on your definition,” she said. “I don’t know that even college students should be writing about murdering someone and how they would do it and why they would do it.”
The controversial “642 Things” book had been used in the high school class for five years before the controversy erupted, Cleveland.com reported.
In fact, the book's content should not be surprising to anyone paying attention. A parent who took the time to look at the cover itself would see it was written and published by the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, which is a clue --- if not a dead giveaway --- of the contents therein.
The lesson to learn from a little town in Ohio, Harvey tells American Family News, is that parents must be aware a left-wing culture is coming for their children and their innocence.
“We should certainly stop exempting educational institutions from pandering obscenity,” she warns, “which is kind of the operating procedure in Ohio as well as many other states in the nation.”
