School Theatre and Citizen Censorship

You know the kids are doing a show right now, The Scarlet Pimpernel?

It’s not academic. It’s real community theatre produced and directed by an experienced company of pros through their own regionally respected musical theatre organization.

As a company, the director and his creative team run the show, deciding everything from which shows to produce, to who’s right for which assignment in each show. As a family, we decide what productions each child should or shouldn’t be involved in. (There was an eight-foot sheer drop Favorite Daughter made playing a roustabout in “Side Show” that I sweated every night, for example. “Jekyll and Hyde” had one dance so raunchy, it made me grateful FavD was too young at 13 to be cast, but she begged to run crew and we let her; I sneaked off to the matinee alone so Young Son never even saw it.)

Which brings me to: as a community, members of the public decide whether to buy tickets or not.

THAT’S who draws the line when it’s real. Pretty educational, huh?

But the schools don’t agree —

Blog for Choice — in All Things!

In the presidential candidate debate last night, NPR noted that Dems speak with one voice of agreement on all gay community issues — except allowing the choice to marry.

Democrats claiming to be “pro-choice” while opposing marriage choice (and school choice — see rants like this one) put me in mind of Thinking Homeschoolers comparing marriage choice with education choice, during the 2004 prez campaign.

Valerie had astutely observed that education is compulsory, marriage is not — thus education choice is opting OUT of the mainstream but marriage choice is opting IN.

Which inspired me to try a thought experiment:

Valerie, you made a great point!

The big difference between education law and marriage law is indeed which side of the closed [public] door people are banging on.

What if we could address the problems on both sides of the door — those who want in and those who want out — by simply switching compulsory attendance and civil marriage?

(Planting tongue in cheek)

So the civil marriage option would become “compulsory public marriage for child-rearing” — we legally declare that marriage is good for children and therefore, if there’s a child or children, marriage is automatically imposed upon its parents. This legal marriage mandate applies to every family with children, but would allow various alternate statutory family structures to satisfy the mandate. Alternatives would be required to register and be confirmed annually, through CPS or the Church perhaps.

There might be mandatory performance measures. Failing public marriages would be placed under State supervision, and failing alternate arrangements would be cancelled with public marriage imposed by a court in its place. As a stiff deterrent to noncompliance, marriage “truancy” would incur criminal penalties.