This may come as a bit of a traumatic shock to readers of the PoliGazette, but it’s become known to the Houston Chronicle that the vast majority of political donations made by Texas’ college professors go to left-wing candidates. Texas faculty member’s candidate of choice for president? Hillary Rodham Clinton.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
In New Hampshire, Concord High School principal Jean Barker turned the tables on a student arranging to sell drugs via text messages by setting up a mini-string operation that lead to the student’s arrest.
That’s what I call excellence in education! Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of frivolous people willing to to take the drug pusher’s side.
In pointing out another case of legalistic lunacy, Susan Duclos writes:
The "zero tolerance" policy at some school and in some states, reaches levels of complete incompetence when a 6 years gets written up as a sexual offender for copying what another kid did and playfully smacking little Katherine DeLeon on the bottom twice.
According to the New York Times, Catholic schools - “long a force in educating the underprivileged regardless of their faith” - are closing en masse in the United States. ‘About 1,267 Catholic schools have closed since 2000 and enrollment nationwide has dropped by 382,125 students, or 14 percent, according to the National Catholic Education Association. The problem is most apparent in inner cities, in schools like St. Monica with large concentrations of minorities whose parents often struggle to pay tuition rather than send them to failing public schools.’ (more…)
The Washington Post reports: ” A parent group from western Fairfax County announced yesterday that it is seeking a legal order to reverse a School Board decision to reroute thousands of students among five high schools in coming years.” (more…)
Michelle Malkin has this story about a California court that has issued an outrageously harsh - and grotesquely incorrect - indictment against the practice of home-schooling.
From the LA Times:
“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey
Harvard University has accepted a Muslim group’s petition to close the school’s Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center to me for an hour a day so that Muslim women can work out without the presence of men in the gym.
Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women’s Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that even after a national outcry against its Orwellian program of thought policing shut down the Residence Life office’s efforts at the University of Delaware, the ResLife office is still trying to reenact the program. So far, the Faculty Senate appears to have had enough and is rejecting the program, but the lack of awareness among the ResLife officials indicates that the problem will be recurring. (more…)
From the Houston Chronicle:
A mandatory moment of silence for Texas schoolchildren has a secular purpose of encouraging thoughtful contemplation and does not advance or inhibit religion, a federal judge said this week in a ruling upholding the 2003 state law. (more…)
Acting in the name of academic freedom, the Modern Language Association, a professional association of professors largely from English departments, has substituted moderate resolutions for at least some of its usual slate of radically leftist causes. What makes this a “man bites dog” story is that an organization that has recently been interested in academic freedom only as rhetorical underpinning for those causes selected and favored by its “radical caucus” as politically correct has abruptly turned a corner and chosen instead to place the general principle ahead of selective partisan causes. Specifically, where the MLA once joined the charge against pro-Israel speakers and advocates while claiming the mantle of academic freedom for opponents and critics of Israel, it has now approved a substitute resolution that explicitly refuses to favor either side of the political divide over Israel: (more…)
The Princeton Tory reports that a conservative Princeton student, Francisco Nava, was attacked recently by people who disagree with his politics. He was beaten until he was unconscious. The assault came after he had received several death threats. What’s more, Princeton seems to have a serious problem in this regard, considering that Nava isn’t the first conservative who has received death threats from political opponents.
One of two assailants, identified as a white, college-aged male, stopped Nava and asked him if he would “help someone who’s been hurt.” The assailant then pulled Nava into a dark area where another male joined in holding Nava’s jaw shut. The two assailants thrust Nava’s face against a brick wall causing abrasions, according to an email sent to administrators. (more…)
Donald Douglas, an Associate Professor of Political Science teaching in Southern California, wrote two posts about liberal bias in the academic world, and more specifically at the Community College where he’s an associate professor. Both posts are well worth the time to read.
Lawyer, Guns and Money linked to one of Donald’s posts, criticizing him, and acting as if the examples given by Douglas aren’t strong. The problem, of course, is that Donald’s experiences don’t stand on their own. I know Centrists and Conservatives who teach at American Universities and Colleges and they’ve told me the same thing. (more…)
Robert Maranto wrote a must read op-ed for the Washington Post about the bias in academia / the political ideologies ruling in American universities. His conclusion: there’s a serious problem. He seems to be something of a Centrist, slight left-of-center himself, but he’s considered to be far right among fellow professors.
Mr. Maranto writes:
I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights. (more…)
Is it just me or is football - the American variety, I should clarify, lest Europe be swept by another plague of soccer hooliganism because of this blog - the employer of a disproportionately large number of socially maladjusted freaks who either don’t know right from wrong or simply don’t care to acknowledge the norms that bind the behavior of the rest of us?
The NFL is, of course, the Holy Grail of football, drawing to itself the best athletic talent in the world and, all too often, some of the worst character individuals as well.
It would be easy to pick on Mike Vick right now, what with his recent conviction for participating in a dog fighting ring. However, with respect to the PETA crowd it’s hard to get overly worked up about the fate of a few dogs what with Iraq, Afghanistan, and all going on. To my knowledge Vick never harmed or threatened a fellow human. Yes, he broke the law. But the PC bloodhounds are snarling and snapping after him for their own sport, just as Vick’s fighting dogs went at each other and with a similar result.
It’s far harder to ignore the criminal shenanigans of one Mr. “Pacman” Jones who, according to the all-seeing eye of WikiPedia:
…has been arrested 5 times and questioned by police 11 times since he was drafted by the Titans in 2005. Many NFL commentators are quick to point out that Jones has more arrests than interceptions since being in the NFL.
One of the events was this little ditty:
On the morning of February 19, 2007 during the 2007 NBA All-Star Game weekend in Las Vegas, Jones is alleged to have been involved in an altercation with an exotic dancer at a local strip club. Cornell Haynes Jr. and Jones patronized the club on the evening in question. Haynes began to shower the stage with hundreds of one-dollar bills, an act known as “making it rain”. Jones then joined Haynes by throwing his own money for “visual effect”. Club promoter Chris Mitchell then directed his dancers to collect the money. According to the club’s co-owner, Jones become enraged when one of the dancers began taking the money without his permission. He allegedly grabbed her by her hair and slammed her head on the stage. A security guard intervened and scuffled with members of Jones’ entourage of half a dozen people. Jones then allegedly threatened the guard’s life. During this time Mitchell and a male associate left the club with a garbage bag filled with $81,020 of Jones’ money and two Breitling watches, which police later recovered. After club patrons exited following the original confrontation, the club owner says a person in Jones’ entourage returned with a gun and fired into a crowd, hitting three people, including the security guard involved in the earlier skirmish. The guard was shot twice, and one of the people hit, former professional wrestler Tommy Urbanski, was paralyzed from the waist down. Jones maintains that he did not know the shooter, although the club’s owner insists that Jones did.
One could go on and on listing the names of pro football players who have been in trouble with the law, including Ray Lewis and Rae Carruth, both of whom were charged with murder a few years back, but why bother? I think you get the idea, which is that for every class act like Tony Dungy or Walter Payton, or Texas’ own very cool but under-skilled David Carr, there is a Pacman Jones ticking like a time bomb waiting to explode.
The irony is, of course, that these rotten apples are paid millions to be bad-asses and strut their stuff on the field. All they have to do to live their entire lives in the kind of luxury that few people can dream of is play the game they love for a few years. But too many of them cannot learn to color between the lines during the off-season or even between games and end up like Vick, the Pacman, or worse.
As pathetic as it was watching Vick finally admit that he’s not above the law, what really bothers me about the criminal element in football is what happens at the lower levels of the game. There are only 2-3000 pro players in the U.S. at any given moment - how much trouble can they cause?
Actually quite a lot, if one considers the ripple effect of their influence.
In college football, for example, football players who have absolutely no business being on a college campus based on their academic prowess (pardon me while I choke…) are treated like demigods by their intellectual betters and fanatical sponsors alike. These players are pumped up on so much artificial self-esteem that it’s hardly surprising that so many have been guilty of criminal misconduct vis-a-vis members of the opposite sex. The classic case took place in Colorado where Gary Barnett presided over a culture of rape that practically screamed, “You’re a football hero - you deserve it! Heck, you’re doing her a favor by raping her with your godly gridiron groin!”.
In fact C.U. is is hardly an isolated case. The same thing happened in Minnesota and Tennessee, and numerous other states in recent years.
Charming.
As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s just as much or more wrong with high school football as their is with the college game/business. Several high school football coaches have been arrested for having sexual relationships with students in recent years. Although dated, the Houston Chronicle published a lengthy writeup on the subject in 2001.
The Chronicle article clearly shows the problem is NOT limited to football or even to male coaches. Even so, my point is valid, especially in a state like Texas where a high school football coach in a small town is like a demigod in his own right. He’s an older, usually chunkier version of the star athlete on campus, just as important and even more powerful because coaches are almost always placed in positions of authority over classrooms as well as their players on the field.
For me this is what takes the cake - the fact that the education process is diminished, even corrupted by schools that insist on using football and other coaches to teach in classrooms as if they were capable, competent, interested educators.
Too broad a brush? Perhaps. But if you find a coach who demonstrates all three of the characteristics I listed above, by all means hang on to him or her - that coach is a rare individual. Even in a best-case scenario, coaching takes an extraordinary amount of time, time that’s going to come from somewhere. Coaches have to sleep and spend time with their families. Unfortunately, too often the classroom is what is compromised when coaches teach.
Suffice it to say that this post would make me a rather unpopular fellow and derail my campaign for the school board before it even starts if the folks in my home town happen to read it. Should they, I doubt if what I have to say would change a single mind. But another football season is starting and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American children will be given a sub-par education this year. And for what? So their town can feel better about its shortcomings by opening a can of whup-ass on the school in the next burg down the road?
Wow! That’s really showing ‘em, to say nothing of the Indian and Chinese kids who are studying their booties off overseas and practically licking their chops at the idea of coming to the States to take the jobs that we’re not preparing our own kids to do.
In a way this is a hard post for me to write because I actually like football and many other sports. My kids play sports in school. I played them too and the best times I had in school were sports-related, bar none.
Nevertheless, if we’re going to make athletics the existential religious experience they’ve become then we should be willing to pony up the whole cost of the game. That is, pay coaches to coach, teachers to teach, and never the twain shall meet. This is especially true in regard to football coaches.
Cross-posted at Black Shards.
School is about to start in Texas and all over the state children and teenagers are alternately awaiting and dreading the beginning of another 180-odd days of enlightenment that will be delivered by the finest teachers a sub-standard pay rate, a regressive labor union, and a back-end loaded retirement system can deliver (along with more than a few woefully underqualified football coaches who must darken a classroom doorway or two lest their irrelevance in the education process be noted). But this post is not about them.
Along with the life wisdom that will be dispensed this year will come an unhealthly dollop of multicultural spam thick and disgusting enough to stop an artery or a brain dead in its tracks. Western democracies, these fragile young minds will be told, are no better than any other form of society found on Earth, of which there are several that are - or were - just as laudable. In particular, no particular preference should be given to America and her traditional values of strict constructionism, Christianity, the Protestant work ethic, the rule of law, or even the English language itself. What is better, is relative to one’s perspective, after all. Or so they will hear.
Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute disagrees, writing:
Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence that “enriches” the curriculum. But is it?
With the world’s continents bridged by the Internet and global commerce, multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student’s immediate surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of “broadening.” Multiculturalists would rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than learn why Islam’s medieval golden age of scientific progress was replaced by fervent piety and centuries of stagnation.
Leaf through a school textbook and you’ll find that there is a definite pattern behind multiculturalism’s reshaping of the curriculum.
…
What these textbooks reveal is a concerted effort to portray the most backward, impoverished and murderous cultures as advanced, prosperous and life-enhancing. Multiculturalism’s goal is not to teach about other cultures, but to promote–by means of distortions and half-truths–the notion that non-Western cultures are as good as, if not better than, Western culture. Far from “broadening” the curriculum, what multiculturalism seeks is to diminish the value of Western culture in the minds of students. But, given all the facts, the objective superiority of Western culture is apparent, so multiculturalists must artificially elevate other cultures and depreciate the West.
If students were to learn the truth of the hardscrabble life of primitive farming in, say, India, they would recognize that subsistence living is far inferior to life on any mechanized farm in Kansas, which demands so little manpower, yet yields so much. An informed, rational student would not swallow the “politically correct” conclusions he is fed by multiculturalism. If he were given the actual facts, he could recognize that where men are politically free, as in the West, they can prosper economically; that science and technology are superior to superstition; that man’s life is far longer, happier and safer in the West today than in any other culture in history.
…
It is a gross misconception to view multiculturalism as an effort to enrich education. By reshaping the curriculum, the purveyors of “diversity” in the classroom calculatedly seek to prevent students from grasping the objective value to human life of Western culture–a culture whose magnificent achievements have brought man from mud huts to moon landings.
Indeed. In America multiculturalism is arguably less malignant than in Europe. Yet on both continents it is still a corrosive, self-defeating mental balm intended to ease the minds of sensitive souls who feel the pain of other people’s injustices so intensely that they would destroy their own society rather than accept the guilt of having made a judgment against their way of life.
In my opinion a discussion of multiculturalism is most relevant in the context of Islam, its rejuvenated war against the west, and the reasons why Muslims are actively seeking to destroy the world’s democracies.
The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover.
…
But many in the west do deny it. They ignore the clear evidence of the goal of Islamising the west. They choose to believe instead that the reason for Islamist terror lies in the wrongs the west has done to the Islamic world —Iraq or Palestine, discrimination or Islamophobia. Indeed, even to speak in this way is to invite the deadly label of Islamophobia — a term invented to shut down legitimate and vital debate about Islamism. Far from defending core liberal values that are thus singled out for destruction, such people thus side with or appease those who attack them. So Europe — bastion of free speech — attacked those newspapers which published and re-published the Mohammed cartoons. And liberals committed to human rights march on the streets of London, behind banners saying Free Iraq and Free Palestine, shoulder to shoulder with Islamists who believe in death to gays.
Why is a liberal society so reluctant to defend its own most cherished values of freedom and tolerance?
My answer, which I believe to be the fundamentally correct one, is that people in the west have lost the ability to make independent judgments about what is right and wrong. In one respect, the cause of this is obvious: objective standards have been replaced by rules of tolerance. Everything is acceptable under the new way of thinking, even the path toward appeasing a terrible, ruthless enemy.
This is true. But the truth is, as always, more complex than that. The one exception I take to Journo’s article is this sentence: “Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement”.
In reality, many, many more parents and teachers understand that multiculturalism is a waste of educational resources at best and a divisive element that is undermining western society at the worst. But they do not act on their knowledge. Why? Because they are held in check by the power structure that, in significant ways, has already been corrupted.
It is difficult or impossible for an individual to act against the forces of multiculturalism because its proponents have one very effective weapon - that of victimhood, alleged or otherwise - and are not overly discriminating in its use. To oppose them is to be a woman-hater, a gay-basher, a racist, or a Christian fundamentalist wacko. Political correctness demands obedience.
Melanie Phillips again:
Many people think multiculturalism just means showing respect and tolerance to other cultures and faiths. If that were so, it should be unarguable. We should all support respect and tolerance. But that’s not what multiculturalism is at all. It holds that all minority values must have equal status to those of the majority. Any attempt to uphold majority values over minorities is a form of prejudice. That turns minorities into a cultural battering ram to destroy the very idea of being a majority culture at all.
…
Multiculturalism has produced furthermore two particularly lethal effects. First, it has left all immigrants abandoned, and none more lethally so than young Muslims. For if there is no longer an overarching culture, there is nothing into which minorities can integrate. Many young Muslims in Britain, stranded between the backward Asian village culture of their parents and the drug, alcohol and sex-saturated decadence that passes for western civilisation, are filled with disgust and self-disgust. They are then given, in our multicultural schools and wider culture, absolutely nothing to educate them about or fill them with respect and affection for the western society of which they are citizens.
Melanie wrote this months before the Brits in their wisdom decided that Winston Churchill wasn’t relevant to children’s history lessons any longer. Not relevant? Sorry, but there wouldn’t be a United Kingdom if not for Churchill. The courage he exhibited in the face of the Nazi attacks is needed in Europe now just as much as it was during WW II. Sadly, it is sorely lacking there as the Brits, while standing more or less with America abroad, consistently appease Muslims at home in the U.K and are losing their national identity as a result. Winston Churchill once noted, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last.” Yet this is exactly what his country is doing in its domestic policy. Small wonder he had to be excised from history.
Easy for a damn Yankee to say, isn’t it? After all, America’s Muslim population isn’t as virulent as that of Europe. That brings me to my most important point, the question of where it will stop.
It will stop, this business of allowing Muslim viewpoints to disproportionally impact western civilization from within. It is only a question of when that happens. Will Americans, the British, et al, decide act on their own initiative and say, “No more Muslim foot baths will be paid for with tax dollars when Christian organizations are banned from campus” or “We’ll run cartoons of Mohammed the Mad Bomber whether you like it or not”? Or will they wait until the war against the west is utterly undeniable, like the Allies watching Poland burn?
At the risk of plagiarizing Ms. Phillips, here’s one more quote that says it all:
Liberals also think they are superior in intelligence to everyone else. So they don’t understand that the Islamists are actually playing them for suckers, exploiting the intrinsic weakness of a liberal society they correctly assess as decadent: no longer prepared to fight for its values because it no longer even knows what they are.
What we are living through in the west is nothing short of a repudiation of the Enlightenment, a repudiation of reason; and its substitution by irrationality, obscurantism, bigotry and clerical totalitarianism — all facilitated by our so-called ‘liberal’ society, and all in the name of ‘human rights’. Western liberalism now embraces its Islamist mortal enemies and attacks its American and Israeli allies in the fight to defend civilisation.
We are giving the Islamists the message that we are theirs for the taking. This is how liberalism may disappear up its own backside.
In short, we must stand up for what we know to be right and demand that our public institutions do the same.
Cross-posted at Black Shards.
Mitt Romney had some good things to say about education yesterday:
Romney said he would work hard to improve schools but did not elaborate. When a woman asked him about how he would support arts and music programs that often are the first to be cut from tight school budgets, he said he was wary of too much federal involvement in education.
Recalling fondly his own high school glee club days, Romney said arts and music education spurs creativity that carries over into adulthood. But he said the federal government shouldn’t mandate such programs.
“While it would be tempting to say all schools should have the following programs, that worries me that someday there’d be somebody up there with very different views telling schools what they should and shouldn’t do,” he said. “I’d like to have local school boards recognize that they need to be concentrating of course on English, math and science, but also some of the cultural elements that make us a society of creative individuals.”
Makes sense. Our students are not competitive on an international level and it’s pretty obvious that our system is not getting it done, even in regards to the basics. Yet it’s very important to keep kids’ minds and bodies active and that means not letting them get bored. That can’t be done from Washington, only local creativity can keep kids engaged and and I’m glad to see that Romney knows that.
Unfortunately, Romney also said this:
“I’m really concerned that schools in inner cities are failing our inner city kids largely minorities and those kids won’t have the kinds of skills to be able to be successful and competitive in the new market economy,” he said. “The failure of inner city schools, in my view, is the great civil rights issue of our time.”
Romney is right, many inner city school districts are not educating or graduating competent students. But who is failing who? The teachers who are afraid to work in these districts for reasons of physical security? Or the students who threaten them? The children who refuse to attend school and disrupt classrooms when they do? Or the parents who condone or are unable to control their bad behavior?
In my opinion, Romney’s characterization of the problem is incorrect. A civil rights issue is one that is caused by systematic and inappropriate application of law or allocation of resources to the detriment of segments of society. The fact that some neighborhoods are poorer than others or even poor in absolute terms is not inherently discriminatory, it simply is.
The graduation rates of American inner-city schools are despicable, make no mistake. In Detroit, only 22% graduate high school. 22%. I can barely fathom that level of failure, let alone put myself in the place of a professional educator working in that environment.
I imagine that Detroit has a hard time getting and keeping teaching talent. Accordingly, salary.com says that the median salary for a teacher in Detroit is around $55,000. That’s quite a bit of money compared to what teachers make in Texas. Funding, apparently, is not a problem. So much for the civil rights issue.
Teachers I know and trust tell me that children are different than they once were, less able to accept instruction, less willing to accept discipline, less willing, it seems, to be students or even children. The education system cannot fix this fundamental problem, caused as it is by the society and homes in which they live.
Ultimately it is up to parents and children - of every race, creed, and color - to take responsibility for their own lives, decide that they value education, and make the most of the opportunities they are given. The current generation’s failure to do so is their own self immolation; nothing is being forced on them except their will and values.
I know there’s no political hay to be made from saying so, but still I’m disappointed in Romney’s position on the issue. He played to the crowd rather than being truthful and a presidential candidate should be above that sort of thing.
In Texas this week, Governor Perry celebrated the June passage of the state’s Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act in a ceremonial signing with schoolchildren at Clements High School in Sugar Land.
“In a society where lawsuits long-ago replaced honest discussion, a culture of fear has led to limitations on our freedoms,” said Gov. Perry. “This trend has been especially troubling in our public schools; places created for the exchange of ideas, the expression of values and the shaping of lives.”
…
In one case, a school prohibited students from wishing a “Merry Christmas” to troops serving overseas. Another school reprimanded a first grader for invoking the name and image of Jesus when she was asked what she thinks of when she thinks of Easter.
“It is my hope that this bill and its guidelines for preserving freedom of faith-related speech will lower the tension level in our schools. Under its clear guidelines, teachers can teach and administrators can lead, knowing they are following a sensible, time-honored, and legal approach to self-expression,” said Gov. Perry.
Kudos to Texas legislators and to Governor Perry for creating and passing this measure - it was long overdue. The act’s text is brief and to the point and is perhaps best represented by Article V:
Students may organize prayer groups, religious clubs, “see you at the pole” gatherings, and other religious gatherings before, during, and after school to the same extent that students are permitted to organize other noncurricular student activities and groups. Religious groups must be given the same access to school facilities for assembling as is given to other noncurricular groups, without discrimination based on the religious content of the group’s expression. If student groups that meet for nonreligious activities are permitted to advertise or announce the groups’ meetings, for example, by advertising in a student newspaper, putting up posters, making announcements on a student activities bulletin board or public address system, or handing out leaflets, school authorities may not discriminate against groups that meet for prayer or other religious speech. School authorities may disclaim sponsorship of noncurricular groups and events, provided they administer the disclaimer in a manner that does not favor or disfavor groups that meet to engage in prayer or other religious speech.
Not everyone will agree, I am sure. But that’s to be expected. The churches of atheism and liberalism have long held sway in America’s public schools and will not appreciate having to accomodate Christian student groups.
Indeed, it wasn’t long after the bill’s passage that Steven Schafersman, among others, began to work the drums of fear in a strident rhythm:
The following is a letter sent to all members of the Senate Education Committee before their debate and vote, explaining why HB 3678 is illegal (unconstitutional), disingenuous, anti-scientific, and mean-spirited. Despite the entreaty, the Howard-Chisum stealth bill was passed and ultimately signed into law by Governor Rick Perry on June 15, 2007. Once the effects of this poorly-thought out statute are in force in Texas, an enormous amount of First Amendment litigation will occur. The bill–now a law–is an example of the powerful Texas radical religious right’s aggressive program to promote and force their sectarian religious beliefs into the public school environment using the power of the state. They do this to counter the Constitutional secular and neutral nature of the public school system, and to reinforce the almost pervasive religious proselytization of children in Texas society. The religion promoted and forced into the public schools by this new statute will be, of course, Protestant Christianity. The new law will obligate captive audiences of tens of thousands of school children to listen to Protestant Christian prayers and mini-sermons under the guidance and direction of state authorities (school administrators).
Dear Senator, I urge you to reject HB 3678, the so-called “Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act,” that is being considered by the Senate Education Committee. The bill is a stealth bill whose true purpose is to promote religious discrimination and proselytizing in public schools, with the additional purpose of damaging science education in biology courses.
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The bill is written to appear to be neutral and lawful, but First Amendment Constitutional law already protects legitimate student expressions of religion. The purpose of this bill is to allow students to aggressively state their beliefs about creationism in science and Protestant Christianity in history, health, and other classrooms without fear of contradiction by teachers.
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The bill creates an officious and burdensome framework that every school district must create and adopt to carry out the stipulations of the bill. This is an authoritarian and even draconian solution to a non-existent problem. The bill’s analysis by Rep. Howard is flatly wrong. He writes, “School children are being censored and reprimanded at school, leaving them in fear of punishment for their religious beliefs. Due to hostility toward religious expression, children are being forced to defend their First Amendment rights in courtrooms all across Texas, and throughout the nation. School districts’ practices and policies continue to violate the free speech rights of students, regardless of court decisions to the contrary.” This is all untrue.
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Howard and Chisum’s religious expression bill is a sham; it is a stealth bill designed not to permit legitimate and proper religious expression (which is already protected), but to promote creationism and encourage sectarian proselytization by extreme right-wing Protestant Christians. If enacted, the new law will create an adversarial environment in which intimidation of religious minorities will become commonplace. The bill will certainly lead to massive amounts of litigation as religious minorities are increasingly affected.
Typical anti-Christian dogma, in other words. Evidently Schafersman envisions a veritable army of teenage preachers holding sway during biology class and the nation falling apart as a result.
What nonsense. The harm done to American college students by a single semester’s political science class - 50 hours of state-mandated indocrination in the alleged virtues of leftist liberalism - is much greater than the sum of all high school kids bold enough to stand up in front of their peers and profess their faith.
Who’s going to get beat up after school? The pack of ne’er-do-wells sniggering in the back of the classroom or the boy who stands up at the front alone and lays out his beliefs for all to see and accept or ridicule?
Schafersman also makes a point about the expense to Texas taxpayers when the inevitable First Amendment lawsuits are filed. This is a valid concern as there is no shortage of litigation-happy fools in this country, Texas being no exception.
Speaking about the law, Perry says this:
“For years, our children have not been able to share their faith and beliefs for fear that they’ll end up in the principal’s office. That’s sure not the American way and that’s sure not the Texas way.”
That’s exactly right. Read the Constitution if you think I’m wrong. Liberals hinge their argument against school prayer, nativity scenes, plays, WWJD bracelets, etc. on the First Amendment. This reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, …
Where is the silver bullet that’s been used to exclude religion from public life? Not in that phrase, surely. Russell Miller, a left-leaning liberal blogger I’ve had discussions with in the past, invokes the 14th Amendment to bolster the 1st. Yet the 14th merely states:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, …
As an argument against public religion this is anemic at best. Worse still, it’s only marginally relevant, particularly when contrasted against the powerful clarity of the 10th:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The 14th Amendment is only relevant if the 1st is assumed to apply - it provides no support whatever to the validity of the 1st. Therefore, the issue is strictly a question of the 1st Amendment versus the 10th. Perry, a politician I don’t care much for, gets this issue exactly right.
Cracking down on kids for speaking about their faith is NOT the Texas way. Furthermore, contorting the 1st and 14th Amendments does not justify the federal government in restricting our citizens from expressing their faith, young or old, in school or out.
I hope that when related cases inevitably reach the Supreme Court that the justices will recognize the state’s right to determine its own standards, as guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. But I doubt that they will.
Regardless, in all respects but that of taxpayer expense - a cost Texas legislators undoubtedly considered and found acceptable - the anti-Christian lobby gets it completely backward. In fact, they seem to have utterly missed what should be the biggest controversy about the new law: minority religious expression and the friction it will create.
What will happen when Muslim students decide to organize a Religion of Peace club at the local high school?
As to that we can only wait and see.
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