Naughty New Hampshire Bookworms

Some lunatic in the Christian state of New Hampshire has got himself arrested for interrupting a school board meeting in protest at teenagers being made to read about sex. The novel in question, Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes, also incorporates healthier, more all-American subjects like bullying and shooting people; but it does have a one-page sex scene which, according to the horrified parent, reads "like a transcript for a triple-X porno movie". I have never read Picoult's book, but the explicit extracts quoted in the press hardly seem to measure up to the child-corrupting likes of Kurt Vonnegut, or even Anne Frank; one can only conclude that triple-X porno movies in the Christian state of New Hampshire must be rather tame affairs. In any case, the school has issued a grovelling apology affirming the Constitutional primacy of family values over freedom of thought, and has promised to revise its policies so that parents can make a positive contribution to the process of censorship rather than merely complaining from the sidelines.