Virginia rejects bill to make schools warn parents of 'explicit' books

State’s board of education throws out controversial legislation that
would have required warnings to be issued of ‘sexual content’ in texts
such as Romeo and Juliet

Danuta Kean
Monday 30 January 2017 15.48 GMT

An attempt to give parents a veto over the teaching of books deemed to contain sexually explicit content has been thrown out by Virginia state education authorities, marking the end of a controversial bill that would have enabled parents to ban children from studying classics such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Diary of Anne Frank and Romeo and Juliet if they deemed their content sexual.

Members of the Virginia board of education rejected the proposal, saying defining sexually explicit content was not a matter for the board.

“We are addressing this by saying we are not going to address the sexually explicit issue in the classroom and we are going to rely on local policy to deal with those issues,” board member Daniel Gecker told the Richmond Times.

The board said that while it acknowledged parents had a right to know what children were taught, titles’ content would not be flagged to them.

The decision marked the end of a three-year campaign by parent Laura Murphy, who complained that her son had been assigned Morrison’s Beloved to read in class. Attempts to get a bill through the state senate were stopped last April by governor Terry McAuliffe. Critics of the proposal said content warnings would reduce great works of literature to little more than their so-called salacious content.

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