by Lucinda Ulrich
Daily Lobo columnist
I am appalled by the recent decision to dismiss Austin, Texas, art teacher Tamara Hoover after she posed for artful nude photos.
Being a teacher today is hard enough without a person's personal life coming under attack every time he or she turns around.
Apparently, teachers are expected to uphold a higher moral order than the rest of America. But, what is this higher moral order, and who defines what is moral and what is not?
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Hopefully not today's politicians, whose higher moral order in Washington, D.C., resulted in a brutal war responsible for the deaths of thousands of untold Americans and Iraqis alike. This war was sold to the American public by the president as a security issue based on the belief that Iraq was gathering an arsenal of WMDs, which turned out to be a lie. Is lying moral?
Then there is the vice president, a role model for millions of Americans, who told a senator to go (expletive) himself. Is cussing out a colleague moral? I think not. But nothing has happened to them. The president and his henchmen haven't lost their jobs.
It would seem that, in spite of hundreds of years of social evolution, things really haven't changed all that much. In the old days, teachers could not marry. Thus, if you wanted to serve the community and make the world a better place by being the gardener of youthful minds, you had to not only sacrifice your sanity, but your personal life as well.
This set a precedent that discouraged teachers from having sex. Female sexuality is threatening and therefore must be controlled. All you have to do is look at the history of the world to know that what I say is true.
Are today's administrators, parents and policy makers so out of touch with today's youth that they think some tasteful art pictures of an attractive teacher are going to turn them into Bacchus-worshipping heathens? What do they think their kids are watching on MTV? Ever seen a hip-hop video? I've never seen more gyrating flesh anywhere else in my life. Or what about the Internet, where naked pictures of women in all kinds of compromising positions are as easy to access as a sexually transmitted disease?
We are supposed to have freedom of speech in this country, but like many of the tried and true tenets and foundations of America, that too is under siege. This conservative American climate will leave no stone unturned.
The uber-conservative, religious moral mafia is responsible for putting everything this country stands for at risk, most notably our right to free speech. Defending its position, the Austin School District said that it "has no intention of infringing upon a person's legitimate rights to free speech and expression. However, public school educators are legally held to a higher moral standard in order to protect the young lives they influence."
Let's review the facts. Hoover did not sleep with a student. She posed for pictures that were artistic, not pornographic. It's freedom of speech that protects our right to view or not view what we want - the freedom to choose.
They were done in the privacy of her own home. She did not expect them to be posted on the Internet. Hoover did not brag about the photos to her students. A fellow art teacher, apparently steamed over a row about ceramic equipment, did brag.
Was the other teacher who exposed students to so-called inappropriate material acting in accord with a higher moral standard? Is this other teacher also on leave? Will she get fired, too?
If she was so concerned about the kids, why did she tell them about the photos? It seems pretty obvious that the teacher was jealous, vengeful and had only her own selfish motivations at work.
I think it's obvious I don't believe Hoover did anything wrong. Everyone's got some skeletons in their closet, but that doesn't mean they should be fired. Look at Prince Albert of Monaco, he has more illegitimate children than a polygamist, and yet he's still the prince.
I hope Hoover hangs in there and takes this case all the way to the Supreme Court. What a teacher does and how she conducts herself in the classroom is everybody's business. What she does in her personal life is her own.
