By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate
November-December 1994 – People for the American Way has a message for the parents of public school students: Shut up! With cries of censorship, the liberal lobbying group seeks to silence concerned parents and outraged taxpayers.
Late last week. PAW released its annual compilation of what it terms “attacks on freedom to learn.” “We are witnessing a sophisticated, no-holds-barred assault on the public school, the cornerstone of every American community,” warned PAW’s president, Arthur J. Kropp.
PAW’s definition of censorship is as tortured as it is self-serving. Censorship happens when government says: You can not read this book. You may not see that movie. You shall not play this music.
It’s not censorship when taxpayers refuse to subsidize art that sickens them, when schools exercise discretion in selecting texts, or when parents and students object to offensive course material.
Who are these worms gnawing at the vitals of our constitutional freedom?
In 1992, Michael Wohlgenant, a professor at North Carolina State University, was censured as an enemy to learning and liberty. His heinous act? Speaking out when his seven-year-old daughter was scared senseless by a story about cannibalism.
Little Megan’s teacher read her first-grade class a tasteful tale about a butcher who kills his wife and grinds her into sausage. When the product is a hit, he begins to murder children and use the remains in his links and patties.
Being exposed to this great literature had the predictable effect on Megan: nightmares and an instant conversion to vegetarianism. Wohlgenant requested that the classic be removed from the classroom and school library. The school committee compromised, limiting its use to the fourth and fifth grades.
For caring about his daughter’s psychological well-being Wohlgenant was indicted as the modern equivalent of the Hitler Youth, feeding the flames of a literary bonfire.
Last year, PAW’s censorship survey included an incident in Solvay, New York, where high school students protested being forced to read the poems “The Pope’s Penis” and “A Woman In Heat Wiping Herself” in a high school English class.
The Report quotes without comment a teacher defending the poetry as “mainstream American literature.” Presumably, the self-styled civil liberties champions agree that anti-Catholicism and masturbatory fantasies rank right up there with Moby Dick.
Perhaps most revealing is the group’s attempt to stigmatize three school committee candidates in Littleton, Colorado. The trio made PAW’s 1993-94 report for running against Outcome Based Education, the latest pedagogic snake oil that substitutes the acquisition of “skills” and “human relations techniques” for actual knowledge.
Not only did the campaigns make its censorship survey, during the election, PAW’s regional office in Boulder, Colorado, suggested the candidates could be tools of the religious right, even though none had ties to Christian conservative groups and one confessed he doesn’t even go to church.
An editorial in the Rocky Mountain News urged PAW to stop “looking for Christians hiding under the bed” and allow the educational debate to proceed.
What PAW labels censorship, those without an ideological ax to grind call informed judgment or discretion. In the financial support it accepts, the legion of Norman Lear exercises little of the latter.
Focus on the Family, a traditional values group, did some digging into People for the American Way finances. (Why not? PAW believes it has an inherent right to scrutinize everyone else.)
It learned that between 1988 and 1991, PAW got $479,000 from Ted Field. As president of Time Warner’s Interscope, Field is responsible for the misogyny and odes from the larynxes of rappers like Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur.
Shakur is currently being investigated in connection with the shooting of two off-duty police officers in Atlanta and the rape of a New York woman. The money Fields makes off the auditory incitements of such creatures funds PAW’s efforts to subvert community standards.
By accusing them of censorship, PAW hopes to intimidate citizens who resist the lifestyle indoctrination that all too often passes for public education.
Our money pays for these crumbling cornerstones of “every American community.” Our children are deprived of genuine learning while subjected to an educational freak show. But we are to have no say in the process.
It’s all very convenient, in that PAW endorses the values demolition committed in the name of progressive education and views the family as the principal impediment on the road to utopia.
The right to protest government actions (including those of government schools) is a cornerstone of American freedom. Thus, PAW’s way isn’t American at all. 
