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Joe Quigley - Content-based censorship


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The following is an email from Joe Quigley
(Posted 10-24-02)

(10-24-02) If you have taken the time to read the voluminus emails I have occasionally sent out, you are aware of the swiftness with which anything Gay and Lesbian Positive that I have hung in or near my classroom  has been removed, its removal demanded, and/or I have been called to the office to get scolded. There is usually no lag time between the "discovery" of what I have hung and these actions.
    When this occurs the principal has always insisted, and I am sure he will continue to do so in the future,  that his objection is based on my violating Paragraph J which says that permission must be given by the principal before anyone can hang anything.
    You will also know that this Paragraph J thing is not universally applied to all faculty and staff in spite of the principal's attempting to make it appear so, and that its sole purpose is to ensure that he can censor, edit or prevent any Gay and Lesbian Positive information from being hung. If I do not ask permission things must be removed because of this, but if I ask permission it is routinely denied, or the principal finds ways to stall until the timeliness of the posting is past rendering the request for permission moot, or he will only hang, as he did in the most recent case with the history of the origin of Gay and Lesbian History Month, what he has personally edited to suit his prejudices.
     Beyond the origin posting, the cutting of the reference to Fr. Mychal Judge's being a Gay celibate priest from his bio  comes to mind. And here there was the question that if the violation had been the posting of the bio without permission, why was only this section removed and not the whole bio?
      At the beginning of each class,after taking attendance, I have the students copy into their notebooks a verse of poetry, a paragraph from a piece of prose, or a bit of a famous speech that I project on a screen with an overhead projector. These are famous things that people quote routinely, and I want my students familiar with them. (As a side bar, they were amazed when they found that the episode of the Simpson's in which Mr. Burns lost and then spent a life time searching for his teddy bear Bo-Bo was lifted right from Citizen Kane).
     I then give them some information on the poem, its author and historical context, explain what greater work it came from, and then I read them the piece in its entirety.
    On Monday I read "MacCavity the Mystery Cat" by T.S. Eliot explaining that it came from "Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats" which was used for the lyrics for the musical "CATS". I had copied the whole book off the internet, mounted each poem on construction paper, and laminated the whole thing for longevity.
     On Tuesday morning I taped the  thing to the wall outside my room so it was in the hall. I did this without permission.
     The principal can not miss it since it is six feet high, about two feet wide and on various and loud pieces of colored paper. He passed it twice that I know of on Tuesday walking by my room, and on Wednesday he came to do his evaluation of my teaching performance and so passed it on the way into my room and again on the way out. On Thursday he came to my room for the post observation conference and had to pass it twice again. Later that day, just after lunch, he passed that wall again.
      It has been hanging without permission for two days, and as I am writing this on Thursday after school and as it was there when I left at the end of the day I have no doubts it will be there in the morning.
      Where is the swift call for its removal?
      Where is the summons to the office to have paragraph J quoted to me and a reprimand threatened or delivered ?
    Clearly, although claiming that his actions in the past were based solely on his insistance that paragraph J be adhered to and that lack of permission was the motivating factor in his actions, if this were the case I would have been directed to remove "Old Possum'sBook Of Practical Cats" by now and I would have already been called to his office.
    But there it hangs in the hall without permission,and without the panic.
What is the difference in these cases? CONTENT.
    Had that been a list of the names of Famous Gay and Lesbian People, a chronology of Gay and Lesbian History, or, perhaps even, the "Calamus" poems of Walt Whitman, they would not still be there.
    To rephrase Daddy Bush's phrase in his attempt to keep the WhiteHouse, "its the content, stupid."
    It is not a matter of violating Paragraph J. It is his personal objection to the content.
Content that is imporant, not to him, but to our GLBT Students.
    My intention is to remove it at the end of the day on Friday, just as it has been my intention to remove anything I may have hung for Gay and Lesbian History Month by the October 31, and any other postings when their relevance has ended.
But because he does not object to its content, with this posting I will be able to do  that which I intend to do.
     It has already hung for two days longer than any Gay and Lesbian Positive stuff has hung with the exception, of course, of his edited posting on the Community Bulletin Board.
joe Quigley

 

 

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