The Book of Bunny Suicides should be banned from public schools.

I look forward to the next several rounds. I will begin by presenting my advocacy, & then I will refute my opponent's. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The negative advocacy makes a single claim: The Book of Bunny Suicides allows students access to a myriad of important ideas without violating any state or U. S. statutes. This advocacy is one centered upon a cost-benefit analysis. Essentially, this means that, if I establish that including The Book of Bunny Suicides in any given high school library will cause more good than harm, I should receive your vote. My advocacy is broken up into four benefits of including this book in a public high school library's collection: 1. The book gives students access to important cultural & historical symbols, as well as controversial & difficult-to-handle topics. Funnily enough, this book isn't just strange images of self-aware rabbits in the process of taking their own lives. It is full of images which directly encourage higher order thinking & requires students not only to identify key cultural & historical events, but to analyze the cartoons from that perspective. For example, one of the rabbits is giving the English "bird" to a Nazi soldier in what is probably my second favorite image in the book. This cartoon requires specific historical knowledge to interpret, and can easily generate a discussion regarding World War II. Other images, such as NASA space shuttles, the Normandy Beach landing, & cigarette smoking are also given attention. Even the use of suicide itself can help individual readers cope with and even come to positively express their own struggles with the topic of suicide. 2. The book accesses cross-curricular content, which also encourages discussion. The rabbits in this book employ some especially confusing tactics by which to attempt suicide. One such image, involving a bowling ball, piece of plywood, and a spaghetti strainer can be used to present concepts in physics. Clearly, social studies concepts are represented by multiple historical military references. Health is also represented (via the cartoon referencing smoking as "suicide" I mentioned earlier). 3. The book is a wonderful, progressive example of demonstrative creativity. By this, I essentially mean that students can learn expression from books like this. The author of this book gives us numerous examples of incredibly creative ideas. From the bunny who attempts to kill him/herself via bowling ball, strainer, & plywood to the bunny who plants himself in between a kitchen knife & soon-to-open electromagnet store, these ideas show high levels of critical thinking & creativity. What's more, our students enjoy using some level of violence when it comes to their creative writing, because violence is a part of society. This book is, without a doubt, a portrayal of violence to come, but rarely shows a deceased bunny, and contains no gore whatsoever. We can actually show kids what it means to be artistically violent & appropriately violent in their writing without stopping creative writing all together. 4. At-risk readers are many, and are often forgotten when it comes to finding a point of interest in a given subject. This book, if we keep it for no other reason, we may keep for the students who are underserved. This is a new & different way of keeping their interest in subject areas where little else has worked, and current teaching theory advocates the use of such materials in education. We are teaching life-long reading in a world in which that is harder to do than ever before. While this book isn't the end-all-be-all of reading education, or general education, it is a doorway that we should exploit. The American Library Association has not only recommended this book as an excellent choice for young, reluctant readers, but its sequel, to school libraries across the nation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On to my opponent's advocacy: Pro Contention 1. I have four responses: 1. This argument does nothing to further his claim that The Book of Bunny Suicides should be banned. Of course some censorship of speech is a must. This is well-established in the American constitutional judicial tradition. However, censorship being necessary does not inherently make it necessary in this case. 2. Child pornography, or pornography in general, is a false comparison. Access to this material is limited by federal statute. Last time I checked, bunny cartoons are not. My opponent fails to link the images in the book at hand to materials which have been ruled, either by the Supreme Court or other legal statute, as "obscene, graphic, or harmful. " 3. Having read the book and having reviewed it on a committee of parents, teachers, a librarian, & a member of a school board, we did not find any content that was deemed legally or ethically questionable for students in our middle or high school. I encourage my opponent to bring specific image examples to warrant his claim that this book is inappropriate for this age level. 4. Fun side note: according to one of my sources below and one of my sources listed in RD 1, Taffey Anderson (the complaintant) threatened on multiple occasions to burn this book. :) Pro Contention 2. I have two responses: 1. Please cross-apply my entire advocacy to this argument. I use logical warrants, empirical warrants, & the book itself to prove both educational and personal merit to students. 2. A parent still has the paramount right to individually censor a student's education, and that includes all reading material that crosses that child's path. To censor material that does not explicitly violate public policy is essentially a slap in the face to all parents, as the school district usurps their right in this case and hijacks their ability to parent as they see fit. All school districts in the nation allow parents to control the books that their students check out. This generally consists of a library database notification: if a parent has decided that a certain type of book or certain book should not be accessible to his or her student, that student may not check out said book. To ban the book is to take its access away from many more students whose parents would prefer that their children be reading as much diverse material as possible. Even in a school containing approximately 325 students, only 1 Central Linn HS student (in the case of my sources) is disallowed from accessing this book. Extrapolate this to the Portland school libraries that have it (which have never received a single complaint about the book), whose students number in the thousands.