I guess reading really is fundemental after all

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte found a bizarre column by someone named Rebecca Hagelin. It's basically a shriek-and-clutch-your-pearls piece about how the American Library Association, in conspiracy with teachers, is assigning books that contain "highly sexualized, vulgar garbage, filled with four-letter words and enough verbal porn to embarrass even an ole’ salt."

Well! Obviously things have changed since I was a lad. I mean, there was that sequel to "Harriet The Spy" that described a girl getting her period for the first time, and the Judy Blume books, god knows, are peverted hotbeds of middle-grade sexuality. But I can't believe that even the tightest-wound holy roller from Texas or Tennessee would say they were "vulgar garbage, filled with four-letter words and verbal porn."

So naturally, I'm curious. What books is Miss Hagelin talking about? Oh. She won't tell us:

In the interest of decency, there’s no way I can give you word-for-word examples. And I refuse to give the trashy book and its loser author free publicity in a column that often gets forwarded around the World Wide Web.

Right. Nor does she provide the list of ALA-recommended books from which these collections of verbal porn by "perverted author[s] most folks have never heard of" are alleged to have been drawn.

We're just supposed to take her word for it, although we have no way of knowing what she considers pornographic (all kidding aside, some people do think that about Judy Blume). Or what "perversion" is to her (I'm gonna go way out on a limb and suggest that homosexuality may fall into that category).

It's a neat trick: Fire shrill volleys at people who are actually trying to give children the gift of reading, which has to be one of the nobler tasks given to mankind. Accuse them of being trash peddlers, but hide behind "decency" when it comes to actually substantiating any of your claims.

I haven't seen that kind of nimble thinking since my last Usenet flamewar.