When my wife got home from work a couple of days ago, I said something along the lines of "Did you see that terrible thing that happened with the students who got handed sex-ed literature that basically said women were sluts if they were in de-facto relationships? Since then the story about the terrible thing that happened with the students who got handed sex-ed literature that basically said women were sluts if they were in de-facto relationships has gotten massive.
I've seen it shared on my own Facebook timeline about twenty times, and, more objectively, it's been reblogged by highly-read sources like BoingBoing. So yeah, the story is going gangbusters. I'm sure the people who check the NZ Herald's analytics are popping champagne corks or, more probably, Lindauer. If you do what the inverted pyramid style of news-writing most important stuff first, basically is designed to enable, and you read just the first couple of paragraphs of the original NZ Herald story, you get:.
The material, produced by the American-based Bible Baptist Publications, was handed out to year 11 students at Christchurch's co-ed Papanui High School during a health studies class. And that is all literally true. Students were handed nakedly offensive material in a health studies class. Cue outrage, cue Tweeting, Tumblring, Facebooking.
A guy I know who supports the Secular Education Network as do I posted on FB opining that it was a good example of why religion should be kept out of schools. That was the first place I saw it. I skimmed the first few lines of the article, and felt that hot little heartburn of outrage. I didn't repost it - it was a particularly busy day - but I did mention it to Louise when she got home, as I figured she'd be interested.
In fact, she'd already left a comment on the Facebook page where she'd seen it posted, pointing out that the story misrepresented the context of the actual events. I got the impression that the comment-leaving had been an exercise in futility. A lot of people had reacted just how I had, and also apparently lacked excellent partners who actually read news stories before commenting on them.
