A teacher in Texas (does the city really matter?) has been suspended for the unforgivable crime of allowing a student to read a book.
Kaleb Tierce "is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God" off the list and read it."
Tierce, an assistant football coach, is a third-year teacher at a place named Jim Ned High School and is apparently popular with the students. But that's beside the point.
Coincidentally I recently re-read Child Of God.
Now that I have a son people ask me if I would allow him to do this or that, often these questions are directed at things that I have done, not books I've read. Would I let my son read a book about a necrophiliac murderer who lives in a cave where he stores his victims?
The answer is unequivocally yes. I will let him read anything he is capable of. If he wants to read Child of God I will not only allow it, I will encourage it (after all, McCarthy is my favorite author). Here's my question for the idiot parents of this poor kid - is Child of God anymore violent than the book allegedly handed down by God? A book loaded from front to back with infanticide, genocide, fratricide, war, incest and more miscellaneous murder and mayhem than anything else written since the advent of language?
Are these people afraid their son will start murdering people and having sex with the dead bodies? If that's the case they need to look a lot deeper into their lives (and their son's) than a high school reading list.
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