By Selwyn Duke

What do you say about a situation in which an elementary-school teacher forces children to view nude “art” despite their objections and without parental approval? If you’re like too many Internet commenters responding to just such a story, you call the children ignorant brats and snowflakes and label the school puritanical for taking action against the teacher.

In fairness to the commenters, the story was misreported. After the firing of Mateo Rueda — until recently an art teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum, Utah — the mainstream media portrayed him as an innocent victim of unenlightened prudes. But local parents I interviewed told a different story.

As I reported yesterday, Rueda showed certain inappropriate pictures — one displaying full frontal nudity — to a fifth-grade class afterhaving gotten complaints about them from a sixth-grade class. The parents say he forced children to view the images even after they objected, ostensibly as part of a lesson on “color usage.” One parent reported that Mateo dismissed the students’ concerns, saying that the images “were not offensive to him.” 

If you hear him tell the story now, though, he had no idea the images were there and removed them as soon as he could. As the Herald Journal reported, “Asked if he thought the nudes were appropriate for the sixth-graders in his class, Rueda said he did not. ‘This is not material at all that I would use. I had no idea,’ he said.” Parent Benji Christensen explained this simply: The “teacher is most definitely lying,” he stated.

What is true is that Rueda apparently has no idea — what pornography is. Unfortunately, the comments I’ve seen in his defense indicate he has a lot of company. So let’s examine the matter.

Read the rest here.