“That fairy tale about gay marriage has sparked a civil rights debate in Massachusetts, the only U.S. state where gays and lesbians can legally wed, after a teacher read the story to a classroom of seven year olds without warning parents first.”
“A parents' rights group said on Monday it may sue the public school in the affluent suburb of Lexington, about 12 miles west of Boston, where a teacher used the book "King & King" in a lesson about different types of weddings.”
“"It's just so heinous and objectionable that they would do this," said Brian Camenker, president of the Parents Rights Coalition, a conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group.”
- Original Article
The words heinous and objectionable shouldn’t be used in that particular order. Heinous is a word with much stronger connotations than objectionable and should therefore either be used on its own or after a weaker word, in manner of a dramatic build-up. For example: I found the reading of that book objectionable.... heinous, even! Objectionable following heinous is anticlimactic.
Grammatical objections aside, I still have trouble understanding the label of “heinous” (from what I can gather, the princes didn’t even have graphic sex at the end of the fairy tale). Perhaps I missed out on the “having-problems-with-homosexuality” gene along with the religious gene. Oh well.
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I have a new proposition: instead of banning fairy tales with homosexual themes, we should ban college students from revising fairy tales to fit catcalls.
I have a somewhat misguided sense of distance and thus ended up parking about seven blocks from the milonga (social tango dance) I attended Saturday night. Generally, I’m not terribly concerned about walking around cities late at night. I’ve been lost in Amsterdam’s red light district in the early am hours and actually felt quite safe. This could have been due to the fact that everyone was ogling the half naked women through red-lit windows, rather than the fully-clothed (and not for sale) me. Then again, other cities from Paris to London to Boston have left me similarly undaunted, so perhaps I just lean towards recklessly carefree when it comes to wandering cities at night.
Saturday night, I realized that Columbus feels at least three times as scary as any of those other cities. This is possibly due to a lack of cute foreign or Bostonian accents. More likely, it’s because Columbus actually is scarier than the other cities. Regardless, walking down poorly lit streets in a somewhat saucy skirt and heels late at night likely wasn’t the wisest course of action, but I really hate turning around (it feels defeatist) so I kept going.
In the end, nothing really scary happened, and I now have a reason to bitch about the modification of fairy tales (just like the Parents Rights Coalition guy! I shall be a conservative in no time!). On my way to the milonga, I was whistled at by a car full of college-age boys, one of whom yelled, “hey, I love that Cinderella thing you’ve got going on. Come over here!” I’m going to assume the “Cinderella” comment was in regard to the extra pair of shoes (dance shoes) I was carrying. However, were I attempting to mimic Cinderella, I would have had in my possession only ONE shoe, rather than a total of four shoes. I suppose I could have walked up to their car to explain to them the inherent silliness of their comment, but I decided an explanation probably wasn’t what they were looking for and continued on to the milonga instead.
It seems the quality of pick-up lines is going down the drain. Whatever happened to “if I told you that you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?”, “I like your shirt, but it would look better on my bedroom floor”, or even just a well-timed, drawn-out whistle? Come now, surely you guys can do better than inaccurate fairy-tale references. I find your practices heinous... and objectionable!
