Serendipitous timing. We told you Monday (and the columnist followed up with a column today) that Democrat-Gazette columnist Mike Masterson had married Laurie Taylor, the Fayetteville woman who led the charge against sex ed books and other books with content too explicit for her taste in the Fayetteville public schools. Their relationship apparently fired up when he began writing about the episode.
I urge anyone with an interest in the subject to click here, KUAR, for a long retrospective look back at the whole episode by Karen Tricot and the complicated process by which books are reviewed in the Fayetteville schools today. The Fayetteville librarian, branded a devil and worse by the book banners at the time, comes off as exactly what you’d expect, an old-school librarian who’s very careful about her work. It’s fine reporting. After all that hubbub, it appears that a very tiny number of parents express an interest in what their kids read. Most are content to trust the educators to select books that many kids might need to read, particularly if they are about unpleasant topics like incest which a child can’t very well talk to an incestuous parent about,