A Florida father was cut off during a school board meeting when he began reading explicit excerpts from books found in local libraries.
Bruce Friedman found the book Lucky by Alice Sebold in Clay County School District’s Fleming Island Elementary School and Oakleaf High School, which includes a graphic description of a rape. Before Friedman could read an excerpt from the book during a June 30 school board meeting, his microphone was turned off, and he was interrupted.
“You’ll get [the microphone] back,” the board’s attorney J. Bruce Bickner told Friedman off-camera. “But you’ll get it back to talk about something besides reading pornography into a public television set.”
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Friedman made a trifold poster of the excerpts and presented it to the board despite Bickner’s objection, suggesting to the board that they throw it away. There were only 745 views on the broadcast on YouTube, and Friedman noted there were no children in the room at the time.
“The policy that’s probably going to be passed tonight is a temporary policy, [and it] has the ability … for you to make an objection, in writing. [Chief Academic Officer Roger] Dailey has been very, very easy to work with in these things. He will have it removed from the shelf while it’s being reviewed by a committee. The committee will make the decision as to whether that belongs on a library shelf or whether or not it’s obscenity under A-47.01 obscenity for minors.”
Dailey also assured Friedman during the meeting that the book appeared to be obscene.
Friedman admitted that his own 15-year-old son is not a student at Clay County School District but has attended a private school since the second grade.
“He makes me proud, but I am not going to stick him in a school with groomers and pedophiles and twisted sick people that think these … books and many like them are OK to present to a child,” Friedman said in a later interview. “They are not OK. There’s no literal literary value to any of this. It’s poison.”
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The district has 38,268 students from kindergarten to high school across its 51 schools. Its school board did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
