As a libertarian conservative, I just DON'T believe in censoring things -- which is why I was scornful of the banning of a student newspaper in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Tennessee paper got into hot water for frank descriptions of sexual activities. But just about the same thing has just got an official OK in Indiana. The only difference appears to be that the students there were more careful to get the authorities onside first. Press excerpt:
"Students were trying to protect fellow teens' well-being with a high school newspaper article on the risks of oral sex, school officials said. The four-page report in last week's Columbus North Triangle emerged after a student brainstorming session, said Kim Green, the school's publications adviser. The report, titled "That Other Sex," discussed oral sex and its medical and psychological risks and featured student interviews on how widespread it has become....
Columbus North Principal David Clark said that he was uncomfortable at first with the content when students discussed the article with him before its publication, but agreed it was important after hearing their arguments".
Source
"Insensitive" to Discuss the Death Penalty
The traditional method for executing criminals who have been condemned to death is hanging and that method was recently used by the government of Singapore to execute a Vietnamese-Australian drug-runner that they caught transiting their airport with a huge stash of heroin on him.
Well, it's no news that many people oppose the death penalty. Given how crooked police and prosecutors often are (See here), I oppose it myself. But Australia's hard-Left "Indymedia" thinks we should not even do opinion polls about hanging. They say:
"Media polls leading up to the execution by Singaporean authorities of an Australian man last week appear to have returned a sentiment that roughly half the country thought Nguyen Tuong Van "should hang". Apart from being grossly offensive and insensitive, the posed question of "Should Van Nguyen Hang" .... ".
So just asking if the drug-runner should hang or not was "insensitive". As usual, discussion of anything in plain language was being declared taboo. Plain language is the enemy of the Left. They NEED obfuscation to hide their total hypocrisy. They held all sorts of rallies and vigils to protest the killing of a death-dealing drug runner but killing untold numbers of totally innocent unborn babies is perfectly OK, of course. And when did any Leftists hold a rally against any of the innumerable executions that the Chinese Communists regularly carry out? Dramatizing themselves is all that Leftists really care about.
It does however make sense that the contemporary Western Left would want to make opinion polls on the death penalty as incomprehensible as possible because such polls regularly show that the general public favour exactly what the Left is arguing against. For more on that see here.
