Tucson Weekly: Listen Up (February 25

TUSD hands out a magazine that raises questions about Christian propaganda.
By Margaret Regan
WHEN 13-YEAR-OLD Drew Castalia brought home a magazine from TUSD's Miles Exploratory Learning Center, his parents were appalled by the articles the eighth grader had to read for homework.
One called "A Warrant to Save" was a lurid first-person account of a SWAT raid on a middle-class home. The homeowners were accused of running a profitable drug-stashing operation. The author is a cop who relished using macho language; he described bashing in the door with a battering ram and using a handgun to subdue the woman, whom he called "the female."
"I grab her elbows, lift her upper body and drag her into the living room," the cop reported proudly. "...The female is now running out of steam, her screams now deep, low moans."
Currents Disturbed by what they later described in a complaint to school principal Debbie Bartolazzi as the article's "dehumanized violence," parents Trish and Brad Castalia did a quick Internet search to find out who published the magazine, Listen: Celebrating Positive Choices. And if they were surprised by the magazine's content, they were amazed to learn its publisher. The magazine's masthead makes no mention of any church affiliation, but its web page announces the goal of its parent company, the Review & Herald Publishing Association:
"Our first work at the Review and Herald is to proclaim Jesus--a message of the highest quality.... Little children, young people, and the not-so-young--all have the same need of a Saviour."
The Review & Herald Publishing Association is an arm of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the Castalias fired off a letter of complaint to the school principal and to TUSD Superintendent George Garcia on November 1. They asserted that Miles' use of the magazine raised church-state issues.
"We want a statement of policy from Miles and the school district that the source of all resource materials will be researched thoroughly," they wrote, "and that there will be no proselytizing of our children with material from religious organizations."
To date, they have received no response from district officials, Trish Castalia said early this week. Principal Bartolazzi told the Tucson Weekly that a staff member had checked out the complaint and she was satisfied that the magazine passed muster.
"I was told that it was printed by the Seventh Day Adventists, not published," Bartolazzi said.
But Lincoln Steed, editor of the 40,000 circulation magazine, acknowledges that "it is true, undeniable, and never even hidden that Listen magazine was developed by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and is still printed in fairly close association with other church products."
Trish Castalia had brought the case to the attention of an organization called Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and Steed wrote his acknowledgment in response to a query from the group's litigation counsel. However, in a telephone interview with the Tucson Weekly from his headquarters in Hagerstown, Maryland, he seemed to soften those assertions. He said the Jesus web site message was an overstatement by marketing people. And though Listen "is endorsed by the church and under the oversight of the Seventh Day Adventists" and all its editorial staffers are church members, he said, it is a separate secular magazine.
"It's legally distinct from the church," he said. "It's not Adventist content, and it's not aimed at Adventists. It's not supported by the church. It's paid for by subscriptions."
He added that though the United States is a "nominally Christian country," the Seventh Day Adventists themselves are staunch supporters of church-state separation.
Gene Benton, a TUSD assistant superintendent, said that despite its relationship with a church, the magazine's secular editorial content makes it acceptable for school use.
"It does not proselytize for a particular religion.... In practice, the values people hold are also held by certain religions. (The values) may coincide, but that doesn't mean that we support the church."
Margaret Loghry, coordinating librarian for the district, said that ordinarily each middle school librarian uses his or her professional discretion to order single subscriptions of some 20 magazines. Listen arrived via what Loghry calls a "most unusual" avenue: TUSD's health department paid for 30 subscriptions for each middle school. Loghry said she was not aware of the religious connection until the Miles librarian alerted her to the Castalias' complaint.
"They've tried to make it secular," Loghry said.
Trish Castalia agreed that the magazine has no religious content, "but there's clearly an agenda. It's propagandistic instead of informational. The values communicated in the article on the SWAT operation are about sanctioned violence."
Listen was founded by the church 51 years ago, Steed said, but branched away several decades ago in a secular direction. Seventh Day Adventists are not permitted to use alcohol or tobacco, and they found that their message of abstinence had a ready market in today's anti-drug public school climate. Most of Listen magazine's subscribers are public middle and high schools, Steed said, and he aims for a positive mix of profiles of drug-free celebrities, stories about wholesome activities and hard-hitting features like the SWAT tale.
While the Castalias see the SWAT story as "blatant propaganda aimed at controlling the behavior of young people through intimidation and fear," Steed sees it as a necessary dose of hard reality for teens.
"It's a nitty-gritty war out there," Steed said. "If you're on the wrong side, the police are something to worry about."
Benton said that the Castalias, like any parents in TUSD, have the right to request an alternate assignment for their son when they object to materials a teacher is using. But Trish Castalia said that there's a larger issue at stake.
"It's knowing where the material is coming from. My concern is that with the anxiety or hysteria about drugs and violence in the schools, and the lack of money for districts to generate their own resource materials, that has left an opening for other groups with an outside agenda."
Steed, the Listen editor, said that the magazine's relationship with the church was "never hidden," but it would be unusual for an ordinary reader to detect it. It would not "be relevant" for the magazine to list the information on its masthead, he said. For the Castalias, that failure to disclose is the heart of the matter.
"I don't in any way, shape or form promote censorship," Trish Castalia said. "As long as my kids are informed as to the source of materials and its potential for bias, I don't object to their reading it.... There should be full disclosure of the source."

Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives