"Jehovah! Jehovah!! Jehovah!!"--uh, "Vagina! Vagina!! Vagina!!"

This is frigging pathetic. Via Susie Bright: three high school juniors were suspended for saying the word "vagina." While reading "The Vagina Monologues."

apparently now the suspension has been suspended, but even so, um:

The initial suspensions resulted after the students knowingly went against administrators' wishes and said the word "vagina" on Friday night at an open mic session sponsored by the high school literary magazine Reflections.

School administrators had asked the students to either not read the monologue or to omit the stanza in which the word "vagina" appeared, saying the word would be inappropriate for younger members of the audience who were expected to be in attendance.

But the students went ahead and together finished the line: "I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

At a news conference earlier this week, Principal Rich Leprine said the girls had been suspended not because of the content of their reading but because they had agreed not to say the word "vagina" but then did so anyway.

Stahl, however, said no such assurance had been given to administrators.

The girls were not explicit, she said, in saying before they took the microphone that they planned to go ahead and include that stanza.

"If they had asked us, 'What are you going to do?' we would have said we were going to read the poem in its entirety," Stahl said. "We didn't want to make this into something about us rebelling against the administration, because that wasn't our motive. … We just felt they had made an incorrect choice in trying to censor out the stanza with 'vagina.' "

I dunno. Ensler herself seems to be weighing in here, and that's all nice, but--Where the fuck is Lenny Bruce when you need him?