In Cuba, you can be imprisoned for exercising free speech. In the United States, we are still clinging to the vestiges of a once respected natural right of man. Nationally syndicated columnist Leondard Pitts reports on the doings-a-transpirin’ in Miami:

“Two weeks ago, the Miami-Dade School Board voted 6-3 to ban from school libraries “Vamos a Cuba,” its English companion, “A Visit to Cuba,” and 22 other titles in a series of travel books for children ages 5 to 7. This, after a complaint from a parent who felt that the book, which contains such observations as “Many kinds of fruits grow in Cuba,” was inaccurate.

In this case, “inaccurate” was a synonym for, “does not say that Cuba is a failed communist state where the president for life has people imprisoned or killed if they commit the crime of free speech.”

Just one more reason, I suppose, why public school administrators should not have access to, or control over that portion of citizens’ tax dollars. Citizens, I might add, who for all intents and purposes, have no choice over how the money is spent, or how and what subjects are taught – and who have basically no choice when it comes to whether they would like to contribute to the leviathan that public school has become. Unless, you know, they’re wealthy enough to be able to pay for a public school they don’t use, and send their children to a preferred private school.

“Anyway, it was reported last week in the Miami Herald that the school board’s lawyer warned repeatedly that banning the books violated the board’s own rules, not to mention multiple legal precedents.”

Look, if a private school wants to ban a book: big. fucking. deal. Let them ban the book. They will reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. Their payroll and budgets are voluntarily financed. But when public schools, funded by my tax dollars, try to ban books in defiance of our constitution, have the gall to requisition $300,000 more so that they can take the case to court…For christ’s sake, I’d be hard pressed to hypothesize a better argument for wholesale school privatization.