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The play "Angels in America" has been met with widespread critical acclaim and won, among others, two Tony awards and an Emmy. The central themes of the play are forgiveness, kindness and compassion, but this is not what has conservative groups like
North Shore Student Advocacy in a tizzy. The chief objections of the group center around the play's gay characters and scenes laced with graphic sexual content and pervasive expletives.
The ultra right-wing hate group "
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality" has joined the fight on the side of the parents who want the play banned. Speaking for the group
Peter LaBarbera said:
"It is defended as a literary work that shows forgiveness, kindness and compassion. Of course, the first question that comes to my mind is, how many classical works of literature are there that show these virtues without delving into graphic homosexual sodomy?"
After several weeks of deliberation a school district committee has decided to move the work from the required list to the 'optional title' list, but even this is not enough for some would-be censors.
Lora Sue Hauser of the "North Shore Student Advocacy" group would like to see the award-winning play prosecuted under obscenity laws and banned from publication. Speaking of her group's efforts to
ban the work she said:
"The first route we went down was the criminal, because we saw this as distributing material that is harmful to minors. But basically you can't prosecute schools and libraries, because all they have to do is say there is some educational purpose for these materials.
However, her group of vigilantes ran into a brick wall when they tried to get a prosecutor to take the case. As
Pat Trueman, who ran the U.S. Justice Department's obscenity enforcement unit from 1988 through 1992, explains:
Federal obscenity law says that material can be prosecuted as obscene if it appeals to a prurient interest - that is, a shameful or morbid interest in sex - and if it is patently offensive, and if it doesn't have any literary, artistic, scientific or philosophical value. That's the situation you run into if it doesn't have pictures and is just the written word."
Since there is no question as to the works artistic, philosophical, and literary value, the group found that they could not get it banned, which upset Hauser who said:
"These laws need to be changed,"
Fortunately there is not much chance of that happening any time soon, particularly given the national reaction against all things Conservative that the last seven years of the Bush administration has helped to foster.
But the case remains a disturbing one because it highlights the never-ending battle that rages in this country between those who would impose their narrow cannon of taste and philosophy on the rest of society and the champions of freedom who seek to stop them.
The hypocrisy of the Religious Right, from among whom most of these assaults on civil liberties arise, is blatantly exposed when one realizes that these self-anointed guardians of other people's morality will seek to ban what offends them. At the same time they demand that their religious and moral beliefs be imposed on society in the form of religious symbols in public buildings, prayers at tax-payer sponsored public events and the inclusion of religion in the science classroom.
It is not enough for people like Hauser and LaBarbera to simply not read things they find offensive or to refuse to allow their children to read them, they also seek to deny the rights of those students whose parents did not object to read these materials as well.
One wonders if smut-smiters like Hauser even have children in the advanced English class at the high school where she seeks to impose her values.
