...bunch of fascists.

And that's Texas for you, forever uptight about sex and the human body. hy do they have this unending obsession with sex, just like a bunch of 13 year olds. Texas will just have to get rid of it's artwork and put the museum people in jail.

Grow up Texas and don't be so obsessed with sex. Your just a bunch of juveniles, so puerile.

This isn't unique to Texas. It's sad and terrifying that our country, founded on pluralism, is now so indoctrinated with fear that the tyranny of a single parent is enough to destroy a teacher's otherwise exemplary career.

Art is a measure of a civilisation's greatness. Having effectively dismantled the NEA, cut most art education from school budgets, it seems only logical that even the TV station staff should be so illiterate and intimidated as to black out any reminders of greatness from other times and places.

The current national doctrine does not allow for diversity, questioning, or minority ideas. Our founders would be appalled - and most likely call for revolution.

Please don't tar us all with the same brush here in Texas. Some of us are as appalled as you are about this story. I don't recall anyone casting aspersions about Missouri when our former Attorney General clothed the statue in the Justice Department building.

Tom Greene

The punishment of a teacher for showing children art would be head shakingly laughable if it weren't so completely sad.

My older daughter is currently deep in the throes of reading "From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," one of the greatest children's books ever written. It features a boy and girl of roughly the age of Ms. McGee's students, who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and encounter all manner of (and one very special) works of great art, some of which are patently in "the altogether."

I hope wherever Ms McGee lands next, she continues to bring her kids to the beauty and adventure of art. And I'm sure Claudia and Jamie would approve.

Texas ought to be allowed to secede. We promise we won't come after you this time. Let us know how things turn out. Bye!

We need to give these psychochristians their head. Over the long run they'll just breed to level of retarded Phillistines. See one of the subtle human truths is that the greatest revenge you can have on a control freak is to actually give them control. Flash forward 50 years when the Texas school children can't learn anatomy or science either and their medical infrastructure consists of waving a Bible at Father Sky. Problem solved.

What the hell? Why the Texas-bashing? This is one community, with one poorly-handled tempest-in-a-teapot, and you use it as an occasion to bash an entire state? It's not as if this is the only time in the history of the country that some parents over-reacted to something silly, or that education was controversial. While these freaked-out parents are from Texas, I'd wager that the teacher, the museum staff, and all the parents that *didn't* complain about the trip are from Texas, too. But instead of trying to marshall support for the people in their right minds that live here, you lump us all in together with the small-but-vocal minority of asshats. Good job.

I'm about as left-leaning as they come (former *comprehensive* sex educator, counseling degree, et cetera), but I am also from Texas-- and seeing myself bashed in a column that I had "religiously" read for quite some time is both demoralizing and infuriating.

It's one family in one city that's trying to get the book Fahrenheiit 451 banned-- they haven't been successful as of yet, and it isn't a state-wide initiative. The book has been part of this particular TEXAS school district's curriculum for years.

http://www.hcnonline.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17270600&BRD=1574&PAG=461&dept_id=532215&rfi=6

What a sad day when FARK has more reasonable commentary than Salon...

Is the Gabler family still holding sway over Texas school materials the way they were in the 70's and 80's? I remember seeing a truly frightening story about them on "60 Minutes" back then.

. . . but while Broadsheet says

After that, McGee's professional evaluations went downhill, including a reprimand for wearing flip-flops (McGee says the footwear in question was a pair of Via Spiga sandals) and McGee was suspended without pay.

The New York Times says that she was suspended with pay.

Not the most important fact, but still a fact, in black & white in the Times, and facts are the kind of thing that Broadsheet would greatly benefit by reporting accurately.

Broadsheet is conceived as a kind of blog, or polyblog, and as such has plenty of room for opinion -- as everyone knows, or should know. But opinion is a separate thing from mis-reporting facts.

And that's why all the Texas bashing.

The State of Texas has gone out of its way to guarantee that it will remain very low on the list of "best states in which to receive a public education."

This is only one in a long list of dumbass ideas, like having teachers who have NO credentialling in their subject, teach it at a high school level. Yes, boys and girls, they do THAT in Texas, too, and it's a state law, not local school boards.

or rather, a grammatical version of that last sentence I wrote.

I'm beginning to wonder if this would be an entirely bad thing. They can take along a few other southern states that seem to want to drag the U.S. back into the 18th century (or maybe the 14th). Then, the rest of us can deal with the challenges facing a modern nation.

Not just because one boza principal reacted like a mega-moron in firing a teacher for walking from one gallery to another through a museum space containing a few not-even-very-explicit nudes.

But what is most damining is that the school district community did not rise up in protest against this vast display of principalitiudinous incompetence and this vast miscarriage of justice.

Of course it's just possible that this did happen but was not reported nationally. Let's hope so.