Well, it looks like the morally upright have temporarily abandoned their crusade against Harry Potter in schools in favor of something far more worthwhile: trying to ban a book about the dangers of censorship. It's happening in Conroe, where a 10th grader and her folks are trying to get Fahrenheit 451 removed from Caney Creek High School's curriculum. Yes, that's right, Fahrenheit 451 is the classic book about a society in which reading is banned and critical thought is frowned on. If Houstonist hadn't decided to stop recognizing irony a couple years back, we'd be having fits right about now.

The fight over Fahrenheit began a couple of weeks ago when Diana Verm and her classmates were assigned to read the book for their English class. But Verm stopped reading because she said she was offended by "the cussing in it and the burning of the Bible." She complained and was given an alternate reading assignment, but her dad hasn't dropped the case: He has asked that the book be dropped from Caney Creek's curriculum. "With God's name in vain being in there, that's the No. 1 reason," Verm's father, Alton, said. "There's no reason for it being read." In his complaint against the book, Alton Verm also pointed out bad language, violence and that the book spends time "downgrading Christians" and "talking about our firemen." (We assume he means the firemen in the book, whose job is actually to set fire to books and the homes of people who read them — maybe we're crazy, but those don't sound like "our firemen," do they?) We hope Alton Verm sends his daughter to school wearing earplugs and doesn't let her watch TV, see movies or listen to music — you just never know when something offensive might pop up.

Fortunately, some Caney Creek students are fighting for the right to read what they want by circulating a petition in support of Fahrenheit 451 (which, by the way, was assigned during Banned Books Week). "This was probably one of the greatest eye openers that we've had in our school curriculum," Darrell Lee, one of the pro-book students, told KTRK. "A lot of the people who did sign said that of all the books they had to read, this was the one they enjoyed. It really makes you think about the situation." You said it, brother.