Couple Says School Violated Kids' Innocence, Parents' Rights With R-Rated Film
by Jim Brown
August 17, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Los Angeles pastor and his wife say they are preparing to sue a public charter school for showing an obscene, sexually explicit, R-rated movie in their daughter's ninth-grade English class last February.According to Pastor Brian Lewis and his wife Tara, Animo Venice Charter Public High School, a school serving the city of Venice, California, and the Los Angeles Westside, violated their parental rights when school officials failed to inform the parents that the school would be showing his daughter Alexis and fellow students the R-rated movie, Donnie Darko.
The Motion Picture Association of America gave Donnie Darko the restricted rating "for language, some drug use, and violence." But the Lewises say the movie is filled with all kinds of offensive subject matter, including "gross obscenities, various types of deviant sexual activity, and misogynistic fantasy."
The Internet Movie Database describes Donnie Darko as the story of "a troubled teenager who is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes." Tara Lewis says the film's disturbing and obscene content has negatively affected her daughter both spiritually and emotionally.
"My daughter likes to write. She generally writes poems and things of that sort," Tara explains. "And right after she saw the movie, I started seeing poems with profanity, sexual content -- things that I have never seen her write before, never even found in some of her poems," the distraught mother says. She has no doubt Donny Darko was the source of this new and disturbing bent in her daughter's writing, she says, "because this movie was pretty graphic."
Brian Lewis is likewise convinced that his daughter's mind was invaded by the film's explicit content; he even goes so far as to say that Animo Venice High School officials are responsible for the "emotional kidnapping and psychological rape" of his daughter's "Christian innocence," which is why he says he and his wife plan to sue the school for showing Donnie Darko to their daughter without giving them prior notice.
The California pastor notes that he has rejected an offer from the school's insurance company to settle his complaint out of court. Far from being prepared to settle, he says he and Tara would like to bring others into his fight with the school over its decision to allow the inappropriate film to be shown to kids without giving parents advance warning and an opportunity to opt their children out.
"We would love to launch a class-action suit," Brian says, "because it was shown to approximately 148 fifteen-year-olds. And the thing is that they violated the law when they showed it without parental consent. You know, these movies are restricted for a reason, and these guidelines are put there for a reason. You can't just show anything to a teenager."
Besides being upset over the school's showing of Donnie Darko to Alexis and other ninth-graders, Tara says she is also outraged that the school required her daughter to read Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., a memoir by former gang member Luis Rodriguez.
According to the concerned mom, the book contains hard-core descriptions of drug use, violence, and sex. Members of an Illinois school board that banned Always Running described it as "pornographic" and cautioned that "a kid may get aroused by reading" the explicit book.
As far as Brian and Tara Lewis are concerned, these incidents have called into serious question the judgment of officials at Animo Venice Charter Public High School. With all that has transpired, the couple say they are considering home schooling their daughter or possibly sending her to a private school.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
