As a former resident of rural New Hampshire, Lichfield's recent foray into is more than a little upsetting.

Irate parents demanded last night that the school board and administrators take action over stories assigned in Campbell High School English classes that they found objectionable, including stories by authors Stephen King, David Sedaris and Ernest Hemingway.

The stories included Sedaris' "I Like Guys," which deals with homosexuality; "The Crack Cocaine Diet" by Laura Lippman, which includes explicit sexual material, rape, murder and drug use; a Hemingway short story that includes statutory rape and discussion about abortion; and a King story called "Survivor Type."

If you don't want your child to take the class, then withdraw your child. Simple. However, to argue that these texts, and these writers, are not "literary" or that issues like homosexuality, or drug addiction, or rape are not around Litchfield N.H. teens, is to be willfully blind. To react by essentially banning the textbook is, well, semi-literate at best, and downright stupid at worst. You know those "classic" books? Books like To Kill a Mockingbird, and Scarlet Letter? Most of them are on banned book lists, banned by parents just like the ones in Litchfield.

You want "classic" literature? Fine. Shakespeare has explicit descriptions of rape in in The Rape of Lucrece, and of same-sex love in his sonnets, suicide, and incest in Hamlet, and multiple references to oral sex. Marlowe has explicit descriptions of same-sex love, and sex, including sodomy, in Hero and Leander and Edward II. You've got cannibalism in Webster . . . Milton has angels having sex in heaven, and let's not even think about the filth in the Bible. Or the passionate, loving same-sex relationships.

Parents of Litchfield, your kids know where in Litchfield and from whom they can buy crack, and pot, and who will sell beer and cigarettes to underage teens. They've heard incredibly foul language all around them—most of them, in their own homes, but certainly on the bus and school playgrounds. The language in Lippman's "The Crack Cocaine Addict" (you can read the beginning here) is pretty much typical of what teens hear, and have heard, for years. They know who at school has been raped, and who has had abortions, who has been molested by a relative, and who thinks they might be queer.

But I expect you don't want to talk about that. You'd rather condemn King or Hemingway than look at the actual lives of rural N.H. teens. You're not protecting them; in fact, you're serving to make serious issues—solvable issues—impossible to talk about. These stories don't glorify drugs, or sex, or, well, much of anything except the amazing breadth and flexibility and strength of the written word

But you probably don't want your kids learning about the English language either, because then they'll start to read critically, and think for themselves, which is presumably your greatest terror.

Parents should not be involved in curriculum decisions; they don't know what their kids will be expected to know after high school, and read. Let parents decide for their own kids, but not for anyone else's. If Litchfield does go ahead with this wrong-headed notion of letting parents set the curriculum, heaven help their underprepared teens when they take Freshman comp in college; they'll be shocked to the core to read the literary canon, and discover what's really there in those classics that most of the people pointing to in the comments on the article in the link clearly haven't read (You're recommending Poe? They'd be offended once they realized he had a Lolita fetish—and married a barely pubescent little girl, or if they really understood "Annabelle Lee.")