11 Feb 2006
In Small Town, 'Grease' Ignites a Culture War

It may have started in the kitchen, but it got off to a roaring start: now they've canceled 'The Crucible.':

Ms. DeVore believes it was canceled because it portrays the Salem witch trials, "a time in history that makes Christians look bad."
"In a Bible Belt community," she added, "it makes people nervous."

They've got qualms about the current production, a work by a bard you may have heard about:

For the moment, Dr. Enderle acknowledged, the controversy has shrunk the boundaries of what is acceptable for the community. He added that "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was "not a totally vanilla play."

And forget 'Romeo and Juliet'.

I would wager that many of these same puritans are the same folks who are trying to push "intelligent design" in the science classroom. I'd go a bit further with this, and wager that most of these are the same kind of folks who blame teacher unions and "liberal bias" for the failures of American public education.

Some folks have no sense of irony - others have no sense at all. This case is a union of those two sets...

In small corners of the country, like Fulton, Mo., only a few objections to high school books or plays can rattle an entire community.

(link) [New York Times]

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