"Brokeback" for 12 year olds?

Something is seriously wonky here.
A 12 year old’s grandparents filed a lawsuit against her school because a substitute teacher, a Ms. Buford, showed students--get this--Brokeback Mountain. In class.

Now, personally I think Brokeback is a pretty exceptional film. Ang Lee, Heath Ledger, and Jake Gyllenhall are to be commended for their work. That being said, it’s hardly an appropriate film for eighth graders. It’s rated R for a reason. At the very least, permission slips should have been distributed and collected.

What the article fails to mention is whether the teacher showed clips or an edited version, which could be both acceptable and appropriate (depending on her purpose in showing it), and I hope that this is the case. I find it hard to believe that someone would be so foolish, so unthinking, so, well, stupid to show an R-rated, controversial film in our current socio-cultural atmosphere. For crying out loud, teachers are losing their jobs for far-less significant matters.

Consider Tresa Waggoner. A music teacher in Bennett, Colorado who was placed on administrative leave because she showed clips from an old video about Gounod’s opera Faust to her class. The video was produced for children (featuring Joan Sutherland and sock puppets). Waggoner was called a devil-worshipper, a lesbian, and lord knows what else.

Or the Texas teacher--Sydney McGee--who was reprimanded and removed from teaching after taking her class to an art museum where, horrors! They saw sculptures of nudes. It was a school-approved field trip, and she’s asked the principal about it beforehand. The school district claimed that McGee’s performance was sub-par, and that the field trip only played a small role in their decision to remove her.

But while these stories exemplify the silliness of so many “protect the children” arguments, Ms. Buford’s actions--if she did, indeed, show the film in its entirety--reinforce those arguments; she’s given more ammo to the curriculum police, which only further “justifies” concerns about “devil-worshipping” music teachers, and “inappropriate” museum trips.