Evangelicals intensify calls for parents to pull kids from public schools (thanks, Dennis)
NEW YORK (AP) — Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized movement is now moving from harsh words to action — with parents taking their own children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the same….”The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools,” said Roger Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee. “Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed.”
OK, let’s get something straight, shall we? If you’re a Christian, NO ONE IS DENYING YOU YOUR RIGHT TO BELIEVE AS YOU SEE FIT. Period. End of story. Any questions?
I am sick to death of listening to and reading about Christians who feel persecuted. Never mind that fact that Christianity is the majority religion in this country, and the vast majority of Americans refer to themselves as “Christians”. This persecution complex is a ridiculous overreaction by people who, for whatever reason, need to feel persecuted in order have something to live for.
if you want to pull your children out of public schools, that’s fine. it’s a free country, and there’s no law preventing you from putting your child into a parochial school, or even from home-schooling them. Just lose the self-serving crap about how the public school system is persecuting you because of your Christian beliefs. You may have forgotten this little point of history, but while this country was founded by Christians fleeing REAL persecution, the Founding Fathers were very clear that our government would be SECULAR. That’s not denying your your right to believe as you choose; it’s simply ensuring that ALL Americans and their beliefs are respected. If you believe that public money should be spent indoctrinating children in the tenets of Evangelical Christianity, then you should pull your children out of public schools.
The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists’ annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into homeschooling or private Christian schools.
Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State. One new campaign aims to monitor public schools for what conservatives see as pro-gay curriculum and programs; another initiative seeks to draw an additional 1 million children into homeschooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor families wanting to try it.
“Homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted,” says the California-based Considering Homeschooling Ministry.
Say what? Just because public schools don’t peddle your narrow, judgemental, Apocalyptic theology, that hardly means that public schools are “harmful environments”. It simply means that publics school are secular EDUCATIONAL environments. Their mission is to EDUCATE children, not INDOCTRNATE them. Public schools are charged with turning out the leaders and workers that tomorrow’s world will need, not unthinking automatons whose one and only source of knowledge is the Bible.
Though the movement’s rhetoric strikes public school supporters as extreme, some of its leaders are influential. They include R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an “exit strategy” from public schools, and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and host of a nationally broadcast religious program.
Ah, D. James Kennedy, that scion of righteousness, that Godly beacon of all that is just and holy…that ethically challenged maroon who is willing to twist facts (or just make them up wholesale) in order to convince his folk of his closeness to God. Yeah, he’s just the role model I’d want my children looking up to.
“The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war,” Kennedy said in a recent commentary.
Yes, there’s nothing like a little ponderous, overwrought, overcooked rhetoric to convince the choir than your blessed ass sits at the right hand of the Lord. Even if you’re making it up as you go, you can still convince sheeple of your righteousness and Godliness if you use enough big words and pander to the fears of the uneducated and intoletant.
When you consider that most of the tactics employed by people like D. James Kennedy involve rumor, innuendo, “facts” made up out of whole cloth, and “truth” constructed out of a minimum of information and a maximum of propaganda, it can be difficult to keep a straight face. Of course, it’s got to be tough trying to be righteous in a Godless and sinful world. Why, if a good Christian isn’t careful, their children might well end up like me…and wouldn’t THAT be a fate worse than death?? ;p)
