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A Real-Life Arizona School District Is Tearing Pages Out of Biology Textbooks

Condoms!!
The offending text.

You've got to hand it to the Gilbert, AZ public school district: Its old-school version of censorship doesn't aim for covertness. Rather than order special god-friendly textbooks or whatever else weirdo right-wing sprawl-suburbs do to conceal actual science, this one is straight-up ripping pages from a common and widely-revered biology textbook.

The stated reason? The text dared mention contraception without boosting adoption in the same breath. The local school has board determined that this was illegal.

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In 2012, Arizona passed a law declaring that, "no school district or charter school in this state may allow any presentation during instructional time or furnish any materials to pupils as part of any instruction that does not give preference, encouragement and support to childbirth and adoption as preferred options to elective abortion."

The textbook, Campbell Biology: Concepts and Connections, had previously been approved by the Arizona Education Department. That approval would ordinarily confer lawfulness, but the district is pushing its own interpretation. The school board, despite the protests of the district's superintendent, voted 3-2 to nuke pages 544 and 545..

These pages are where the book dares offer that contraception can prevent pregnancy. There's even a picture of a condom. The horror.

​Via the New York Times, a portrait of cognitive dissonance:

Ms. Smith, the school board member and parent, said she had been driving her family home from church back in January when her son told her about what was in the textbook. "I almost drove off the road," she said.

'I'm Catholic; we do not contracept,' Ms. Smith said. 'It is a grave sin.' By including those pages in the curriculum, she added, 'you have violated my religious rights.'

If the Gilbert saga has a contemporary echo, it might be found in Turkey. Here, after many years of relative secularism, power is steadily tilting back toward something like theocracy. Most recently, ​Turkish sixth-grade textbooks have been edited to replace anatomical drawings of penises and vaginas with pictures of cute polar bears.

In Gilbert, the passage on contraception, which includes information on sexually-transmitted diseases, isn't being replaced by anything.

"Just simply stating a fact, a particular drug and its function, doesn't mean you favor that particular course of action," Chris Kotterman, the state education department's deputy director of policy development and government relations, assured the Times. "That's not how textbooks work. That's not how any other academic exercise works. You provide the context for whatever you're talking about over the course of a unit of instruction." Information—facts about the world—isn't advocacy.

Thank in part an advocacy organization called Alliance Defending Freedom, which had been contacted by a Gilbert parent and sent the district a letter of concern. The Alliance's previous claim to fame had been pushing a state law that would have allowed business owners to refuse service to same-sex couples.