(Cl)ass Warfare

This small town north of Houston apparently wasn’t really Shenandoah all those years — in the eyes of some Montgomery County citizens, it was an all-out Sodom and Gomorrah. But an artificial fig leaf now covers Michelangelo’s David in the Portofino Plaza, and two classic pictures with nudes have been removed from a restaurant in the same shopping center. The great purge has even swept into county libraries, in a battle over sex-education books.

And in the latest crusade against anything the least bit lewd, Montgomery High School has banned the seniors’ official T-shirts from campus. After all, they’re adorned with a phrase that some deemed patently offensive: “Kiss My Class Goodbye!!!”

Jamey Duckworth of The Woodlands wonders when the censorship will stop. “It seems that small issues come up and no one sees the bigger issues,” she says.

Duckworth claims the problem with the conservative county on Houston’s northern doorstep is its Republican Leadership Council. The founder, Eric Yollick, resigned last year. He was irate at the RLC protests that got the fig-leaf facade added over the David statue atop an Oshman’s sporting goods store. “I’m more offended by what they’re trying to do to that sculpture than [by] the sculpture itself,” the media quoted her as saying.

The group, which is not formally linked to the county’s Republican Party, was undaunted. It also deemed two pictures in Buca di Beppo restaurant indecent.

“The funny part of all this is that in the same shopping center is a statue of Venus de Milo,” Duckworth says. “They don’t seem to have a problem with that statue.”

The RLC also targeted the county’s libraries for carrying two children’s sex-education books by Robie H. Harris, It’s Perfectly Normal and It’s So Amazing. After initially being taken out of circulation, the books were restored to readers by Montgomery County Commissioners Court, which did not find them inappropriate because of references to homosexuality and explicit illustrations. Unfazed, the RLC has turned its wrath on Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting by James Kincaid.

Battles over the books led to the formation of the group’s nemesis, Mainstream Montgomery County, which is fighting to return David and the restaurant art to full-monty status and to keep the disputed books on the library shelves.

“We want to be the voice of tolerance and the voice of reason to our elected officials and businesses in Montgomery County,” says interim co-chair Anne Bayerkohler.

She says she heard that the reason the protesters targeted the David statue was because some opponents believed that statue in particular is somehow used to promote homosexuality.

MMC, in challenging the effort by the RLC to remove the books, took the volumes to show people while they were gathering petition signatures for the books at Montgomery Community College. Police responded to a complaint from the opposition that MMC was showing pornography and told the group not to display the books unless someone requested to see them.

“I can only speculate why it’s being an ordeal. I think that these beliefs stem from ignorance,” Bayerkohler said of the censorship effort. “There’s this herd mentality. It’s not everyone, though, but the most vocal people seem to be speaking out of ignorance.”

Bayerkohler, of The Woodlands, says her organization is also concerned about efforts to get mentions of slavery omitted from state textbooks, and the possible ban of sex-education classes for elementary school students in Splendora ISD.

Mainstream Montgomery County also considered entering the fray over Montgomery High School’s banned T-shirts, but the relatively new group decided that it doesn’t yet have enough active members to take on that issue in the town of Montgomery.

Montgomery High’s Web site boasts a motto for the current school year of “Uniting in Challenges,” although the shirt controversy showed anything but unity for the school.

Each year, the seniors decide on a T-shirt design for the class and sell them for $10 each to raise funds for the graduation party. This year, parents Debbie Cope and Leslie McManus say parents routinely went through a national catalog and selected shirts with the phrase “Kiss My Class Goodbye!!! 2003.”

Cope told local reporters that to avoid any problems with misconstrued meanings, the parents put in the order for the slogan to appear on the front — rather than the back — of the shirts.

The design was approved, but after the shirts arrived, Principal Bobby Morris banned them from campus as a violation of the district’s dress code.

Morris told the Conroe Courier that the language is “suggestive of vulgarity not appropriate for school” and claimed he had never approved the message. Angry parents have held several meetings with Morris and Superintendent Bob Smith.

The central figures in the controversy — Morris, Smith, McManus and Cope — either did not return calls or declined to discuss the situation. McManus says that the media attention has taken the issue too far.

Senior Kendle Wade says the students are having a contest to select a design for replacement shirts, which would be exchanged for the banned ones. However, it remains uncertain where the funds would come from to pay for the second series of shirts.

“A lot of kids are upset because the school said it was okay, and they went ahead and bought the shirts,” Wade says. “The whole idea was to wear them to school.”

Teri Lesesne, the mother of an 11th-grader at MHS, says she believes the slogan was fine for the graduating students. “I thought it was awfully clever. It’s their senior year; let them be expressive and creative.”

The RLC was not involved in the dispute, but critics of the ban suspect it had some influence, at least from the earlier censorship efforts by the group.

“There’s a small group of people who say [the slogan] is vulgar, and the principal has the idea that no one else’s opinions count,” Lesesne contends.

Former student Goeff Golder says he spent four years at Montgomery and, rather than feeling like he was in an educational environment, he felt like he was an unwelcome arrival at a country club.

He says the principal prefers that no one question his authority. During his time at MHS, Golder says, he was kicked off the academic decathlon team for trying to sell a date with himself on eBay.

“They dictate the kids. Their only concern is making the TAAS test scores higher,” Golder says. “The T-shirt issue is ridiculous.”

According to Lesesne, this isn’t the first issue Morris has been dismissive over. “It’s done and over. Things are handled in a dismissive attitude that upsets everybody,” Lesesne says.

Duckworth, the critic of the earlier RLC actions, has a daughter at The Woodlands High School. She says it’s the voice of the kids in a sense that’s being muffled.

“If my daughter and her friends came up with that shirt, I’m gonna give any of them a hug and kiss good-bye because they’ve got a hell of a world in front of them,” Duckworth says.

Lesesne concurs: “Let’s get with the teaching and let the kids wear their stupid shirts.”