It recently came to Craig’s attention that five Republican state senators have introduced a new bill, SB 1467, which would effectively require any public school in Arizona to suspend without pay or terminate the employment of any teacher who “engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.” You can’t drop an f-bomb on TV, so an f-bomb in the classroom would get you suspended. Three f-bombs would get you fired. This would apply to elementary school teachers, up through the university. And the language of this bill is broad, could even apply to reading out loud from classic literature, from, say, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or the Ander Monson essay that Craig had his 201 students read out loud from just yesterday.
Now granted, Craig does not believe this anti-profanity bill will pass, because it is so obviously crazy. It has already been dubbed “ridiculously overbroad,” “unnecessary,” and “unconstitutional.” But, of course that was also his reaction to HB 2281, and look what happened: MAS classes in TUSD have been shut down, and Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States have been removed from public school classrooms, along with dozens of other contraband books, including, famously, The Tempest.
The lesson, for Craig, is clear: Give an inch and the fascists (he looked up the definition, yes, and fascist, small f, is correct) will take a mile. So Craig is instigating a personal policy of small, random acts of protest: He wants you to know that HB 1467, the idea of it, at least as it is written now, is bullshit.
