Monday was a historic day for same-sex couples in Iowa. And, apparently, a scary one for the Storm is Coming crowd. William C. Duncan of the Marriage Law Foundation is concerned about the effect of gay marriage on religious liberty:

There is another setting where a conflict is assured - public education. When the government redefines marriage, government schools are not free to ignore the new policy. Tolerance, family life, and sex-education curricula are automatically affected. When the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims of some Massachusetts parents that they deserved advance notice of classroom curricula and discussions involving alternative families, the court said public schools “have an interest in promoting tolerance, including for the children (and parents) of gay marriages.”

It’s passing strange for Mr. Duncan to discuss public schools in the context of religious liberty, since to the best of my knowledge we have that whole separation-of-church-and-state thing going for us in America. And it’s unclear what Mr. Duncan means when he says that government schools are not free to ignore government policy. In many states, the sex education decisions are made at the local district level, so curricula would not be “automatically affected.” Prop 8 proponents tried this scare tactic in California, even though State Superintendent Jack O’Connell said, “There is no requirement, no mandate for any school in the state of California to have this [gay marriage] required as a course.”

Perhaps most absurd is that Mr. Duncan wields the court’s judgment that public schools “have an interest in promoting tolerance” as if this were a bad thing. Amazingly, he’s not even referring to tolerance for gay individuals but for the children of gay marriages. If it’s the teaching of tolerance Mr. Duncan fears, then perhaps he should be worried. As Matthew Yglesias said:

Clearly, a state adopting a non-discriminatory marriage policy doesn’t actually force the state to teach non-discriminatory values in schools. But the two tend to go together. We not only don’t have Jim Crow anymore, but we teach people that racism is wrong. This is, it’s true, a big imposition on racists. And people who don’t like gay people can be legitimately concerned that the spread of gay equality will create an environment in which their children are less likely to share their own prejudices.

I haven’t commented on the ongoing Redding v. Safford court case because pretty much everyone from the New York Times to the National Review agrees that school officials shouldn’t strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of carrying ibuprofen. Everyone, that is, but the Supreme Court. Judging by today’s reports, it seems likely the court will overturn last year’s decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and rule that the Safford School District’s search was neither unconstitutional nor unreasonable.

That the court’s conservative justices would side with the district (Justice Antonin Scalia: “You’ve searched everywhere else. By God, the drugs must be in her underpants!”) isn’t surprising. But I’m having a hard time knowing what to say about this:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a swing vote on many issues, has voted regularly to give police and school officials greater leeway to search for drugs.

“Is the nature of drug irrelevant?” he asked. What if “there is a very dangerous drug — meth — that’s going to be distributed that afternoon?”

He asked whether a search in that instance would be reasonable.

No, Wolf replied. There was no reason to think a 13-year-old honor student had pills in her underwear, he said.

That reply did not appear to persuade Justice Stephen G. Breyer. It is “a logical thing” for adolescents to hide things. “They will stick them in their underwear,” he said.

“And in my experience people did sometimes stick things in my underwear,” he added, provoking laughter in the courtroom.

Breyer also questioned whether the strip-search was especially embarrassing. He said students regularly change into their gym clothes at school.

Right. Because changing clothes in a locker room (which, by the way, is embarrassing for many adolescents) is really the same thing as two adults telling a 13-year-old girl to pull her bra and underwear away from her body. So they could check, before calling her mother, not for meth or heroin or cocaine or even marijuana but for ibuprofen. Which they were told would be there by another student who had been caught with a pill. Who as it turned out - shocker - was lying.

This isn’t about a school’s right to search lockers or a student who posed an immediate threat. The school’s decision was unreasonable and unconscionable. If the Supreme Court rules in the district’s favor, its decision will be too.

Update: Dahlia Lithwick nails it:

we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked. And the parents? They are always the last to know.

Does it seem strange to have a book banning story sans Sarah Palin, or am I the only one still going through election withdrawal? (Not saying I need her back in my life, just sayin’, seems strange.)

Still, book banning it is in the city that, Will Smith informed us, keeps the roof blazing. (Miami, for those unfamiliar with mid90’s obscenity-free rap.) Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a Miami-Dade County School Board ban of “A Visit to Cuba” (en Espanol: “Vamos a Cuba”), a book for 5-8-year olds about life in Cuba. The ban came after a parent who was a political prisoner in Cuba complained that the book avoids all mention of the country’s problems while showing smiling children in communist uniforms.

It’s hard not to have a knee-jerk reaction against book banning, right? Short of not reading “Lolita” to third-graders, I’m generally against any sort of school - or otherwise public - censorship of fiction (whether or not a book ought to be taught or read out of aesthetic or literary considerations being an entirely different matter than its removal from a library).

Fiction, after all, grants the writer virtually endless license to paint the world as they see fit. Nonfiction is a different matter, though; there is an obligation to the truth. The problem is that the truth isn’t always absolute. On Tuesday, for instance, Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed in a must-read The Root piece that Lincoln’s racial views were not as black and white as we think. Part of growing up and learning is accepting that different people view things from different angles; there’s not always one right answer.

This isn’t meant to be moral equivocation about communism. Only to say that we shouldn’t be banning books, but rather encouraging the proliferation and exchange of lots of diverse ideas, especially in schools. As the NY Times wrote in opposing the decision, “If the board wants to oppose the totalitarianism of the Castro regime, banning books is an odd way to go about it.”

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