Sham homeschools are fostering a radical right wing fifth column
Until the 1980s homeschooling was a benign activity that affected very few children. After homeschooling became dominated by right wing Christian theocrats, millions of vulnerable children (estimates are suspect because of poor reporting requirements) became virtual prisoners in their own homes, pawns in a scheme to overthrow the United States Government and replace it with a theocracy. The theocrats scheme includes lobbying state legislatures, pressing free exercise of religion cases in the courts and collusion with extreme right wing Republican officials. The result is an almost total lack of oversight by government officials. It will require dedication for the new administration to undo the Bush administration handiwork.
Legitimate homeschools are in league with the sham homeschools because they also want to prohibit any kind of oversight or control. Although the legitimate people have a small public voice, the radical right are loaded with resources and lobbyists.
The Supreme Court gave parents the right to teach children the tenets and the practices of their faith back in 1944. (Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 164 (1944). The Prince decision, together with the Yoder vs Wisconsin decision inspired theocratic zealots to create a rebellious strain of home schooling. Lead by radicals, this movement is creating a virtual fifth column of ignorant children raised to hate democracy and to revile and distrust their government institutions. In this way, the theocrats are systematically grooming innocent children through a staged process involving homeschools, a project called Generation Joshua and the Patrick Henry College. Their aim is to quietly infiltrate, hamper, frustrate and then dismantle the government of the United States and establish a theocracy according to Dominionist theology. The theocrats plan seems to be working because the Bush administration opened the doors of government to Patrick Henry College graduates while the general public has taken little notice. But then, the devious theocrats are anything but honest and above board. They are like cockroaches, termites and other vermin that hide out of sight. They will not advocate a public position because they know they cannot win an honest public debate.
No one contemplated the political power extreme right wing Christians would usurp in the latter decades of the 20st century. Nor, how they would first systematically attack the public school system and then in frustration, how they would begin to withdraw their children from public schools in astonishing numbers. Able to mobilize thousands of parents to swamp legislatures with denial of service calls and emails, they steam rolled their agenda of removing truancy laws across the country. There was little or no opposition from the federal or state governments, who depend upon reliable telephone and Internet connections to operate. Denial of service attacks combined with bare knuckle political threats became weapons of choice and are still used today. HSLDA even brags about their success in hampering the functioning of government.
With sequestered children constantly supervised by zealous despotic parents, the indoctrination of a backward debauched religion can take place 24 hours a day seven days a week. Out of sight, the indoctrination goes unnoticed. The unfortunate children’s parents rigorously shield them from civilian authority, and they are not allowed to associate with anyone that has not been pre-approved. Parents heavily monitor and restrict radio, television, movies, the Internet and live entertainment events. When legal problems threaten, parents use the threadbare guise of sacrosanct religious liberty and call on well heeled advocacy groups like Michael Farris’s Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), Focus on the Family, The Pacific Justice Institute, and The Eagle Forum to name just a few far right heavily funded special interest groups of dubious character.
In these families, there will be no nonsense about Title 9 gender equality, or sex education or tolerance of other’s beliefs; parents are convinced they alone have the truth and all outsiders are Satan’s spawn that are going to hell. There is no effort to teach the children how to reason or make moral judgments based on logic; morality lessons consist of picked over biblical dogma.
This trend has been in place for nearly 20 years and has spawned a vast infrastructure of lobbyists, legal assistance groups, and purveyors of “approved” curriculum materials. Many curriculum materials advertise that they teach subjects in a “godly” way. Believe it or not there are even teaching materials that extend this pedagogy to mathematics!
Dr. Rob Reich (Professor of Political Science and Ethics at Stanford University ) explains what he considers is the major problem in terms of parents deliberately frustrating the development of autonomy in their children:
The problem with homeschooling and parental authority over education arises not out of conflicts over whether children should become independent adults. Few people wish to defend the authority of parents who plainly care too little. The problem arises over parents who, as it were, care too much in seeking to prevent the development of autonomy in their children. I mean to suggest that parents who wish to control the socialization of their children so completely as to instill inerrant beliefs in their own world view or unquestioning obedience to their own or others’ authority are motivated often by a fervent care for, not neglect of their children. Even when defined minimally, some parents may object to the idea that their children should receive an education that promotes their critical thinking and capacities for reflection on their own and other’s ends. Being minimally autonomous, I claimed, was in the interest of the child for personal and civic reasons. The fact that autonomy is necessary for citizenship makes education for autonomy an interest of the state as well. Thus, when parents reject the facilitation of autonomy in their children, they find themselves in conflict with both the interests of the child and of the state.
A measure of just how thoroughly the theocrats took control of the US Department of Education can be gained by the comments made by Jack Klenk, Director of the Office of Non Public Education at the U.S. Department of Education at a recent meeting sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA a vociferous foe of homeschool oversight ) and featuring eight congressional representatives . Here is part of the HSLDA report on their web site:
Mr. Klenk has served in the Department for over 20 years, and he talked about how he has seen homeschooling start and grow through the years. He also acknowledged that the Department of Education has heard the homeschool community’s message that the “federal government must leave homeschoolers alone,” and will honor that message. He closed by sharing his and the current administration’s belief that “homeschooling is good for children, good for families, and good for society.
Have we no right to expect impartial judgments emanating from such a high government official? Mr Klenk has hopefully departed to other pursuits by this time, if he has not been fired.
The corrupt Bush administration and his allied theocrats were determined to surreptitiously undermine and drag down the government of the United States. Accordingly, it should be obvious to Americans that the Obama administration must act decisively to regulate homeschools on an urgent basis.
Professor Rob Reich proposed the following provisional framework some years ago:
A PROVISIONAL REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR HOME SCHOOLING
Recall that the purpose of these regulations is to help ensure that the state’s interest in providing a civic education for children is met, and to protect the independent interest of the child in developing into a free or autonomous adult. … I propose three minimal regulations. The results of the democratic process might yield additional regulations, which would not necessarily be inconsistent with my views, but these seem to me the bare minimum, as follows:1. All parents who home school must register with a public official. The state needs to be able to distinguish between truants and home-schooled students, and it needs a record that specific children are being home schooled so that its other regulations can be enforced.
2. Parents must demonstrate to educational officials that their homeschool curriculum meets some minimal standard. The minimal standard will include academic benchmarks as well as an assurance that children are exposed to and engaged with ideas, values, and beliefs that are different from those of the parents. For instance, every home-school curriculum should include information about a variety of religious traditions (I believe this should be the case, as well, for public and private schools.) Parents are free to teach their children that their own religious faith is the truth, but they cannot shield children from the knowledge that other people have different convictions and that these people are, from the standpoint of citizenship, their equals.
3. Parents must permit their children to be tested periodically on some kind of basic skills exam. Should home-schooled children repeatedly fail to make progress on this exam, relative to their public or private school peers, then a case could be made to compel school attendance. Label this educational harm. (The same kind of educational harm surely exists in some public schools, of course. And this is one reason that I believe parents should have the authority to hold the state accountable for public schools by pulling their children from failing schools and enrolling them elsewhere.) In short, these regulations amount to the following:
• The state registers who is being home schooled.
• The state insists upon a curriculum that meets minimal academic standards and that introduces students to value pluralism.
• The state tests students periodically to ensure that minimal academic progress is being made.Would many home schools be unable to meet these regulations? …. If creating and enforcing regulations would prevent even a few children from suffering educational harm or from receiving an education that stunted or disabled their freedom, the regulations would be worthwhile. Strictly enforced regulations ensure that parents do not wield total and unchecked authority over the education of their children. What is at stake here is not a question of social utility or stability, whether home schooling could threaten democracy. What is at stake is the justice that we owe children, that they receive an education that cultivates their future citizenship, their individual freedom, and that teaches them at least basic academic skills, skills that are necessary for ably exercising both their citizenship and their freedom.”
I wish I could be as sanguine as Rob Reich, because our democracy could clearly be at risk if millions of compromised children continue to go through this warped religious soaked system. In addition, why settle for minimum standards?
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1020/cover.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7630851222567912489#docid=5881186192356745364
God’s Next Army
Documentary about Patrick Henry College for homeschooled evangelical children.
http://www.truthout.org/article/christian-reconstructionists-trying-take-dominion-america
http://www.parentalrights.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={1F86E588-AA4A-43A1-998D-D9BF4FBE4D09} Michael Farris brags about denial of service attack.
About Michael Farris and sham home schools:
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homes
Purge of Professors at Patrick Henry
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/26/83129/0021
http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/dominionism.htm
Reports on the web include:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/5/155457/0298
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homeschool/2009/06/16/reconstruction-theology-and-home-education/
Books
American Fascists, The Christian Right and The War on America, by Chris Hedges
Kingdom Coming, The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury by Kevin Philips
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2047
Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling
Author: Robert Kunzman
Product Code: 3291 ISBN: 978-080703291-6
Copyright Date Ed: 08/01/2009
A compelling look at conservative Christian homeschooling families—and the worldview that could radically alter American political and intellectual life.
Reports on the web include:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/5/155457/0298
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homeschool/2009/06/16/reconstruction-theology-and-home-education/
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How Idiot America got that way
- Image by permanently scatterbrained via Flickr
… increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its “socialist” healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and “I wouldn’t be here without the NHS”.
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and that all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them. …
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have “faith” – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don’t have “faith” that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need “faith” to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
If children are taught to not only believe things on faith, but to also reject claims that are supported by evidence and reason when those claims contradict faith, then it shouldn’t be surprising that we get beliefs like those listed above. This sort of attitude is a great benefit to authority figures since they are, of course, the ultimate arbiters of which beliefs should be taken on faith and which shouldn’t.
What would happen if American schools instituted not just classes on critical thinking and skepticism, but actually inserted lessons on critical thinking throughout the curriculum? What would happen if students in public schools were consistently taught the importance of believing things based on evidence and reasoned arguments, not faith or slavish adherence to tradition or authorities? Who would be able to object without looking completely foolish? — Austin Cline, About.com
Religion Makes Conservative Republicans Impervious to Facts
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A Q&A with Charles P. Pierce, author of Idiot America
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”
Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?
Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?
Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?
Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.
Question: You delve into Ignatius Donnelly’s life story. In 1880, he published the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in an attempt to prove that the lost city existed. Yet, you characterize Donnelly as a lovable crank, and don’t take issue with him as you do with modern eccentrics, like Rush Limbaugh. What’s the difference between a harmless crank and a crank in Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: Cranks are noble because cranks are independent. Cranks do not care if their ideas succeed—they’d like them to do so—but cranks stand apart. Their value comes when, occasionally, their lonely dissents from the commonplace affect the culture, at which point either the culture moves to adopt them and their ideas come to influence the culture. The American crank is not someone with 600 radio stations spewing bilious canards to an audience of “dittoheads.” The concept of a “dittohead” is anathema to the American crank. He is a freethinker addressing an audience of them, whether that audience is made up of one person or a thousand. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.
Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don’t notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
Question: Is there a voice or leader of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The leaders of Idiot America are those people who abandoned their obligations to the above. There are lots of people making an awful lot of money selling their ideas and their wares to Idiot America. Idiot America is an act of collective will, a product of lassitude and sloth.
Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?
Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
Question: While writing Idiot America, what story or incident made you the most incensed?
Charles P. Pierce: Without question, it was talking to the people at Woodside Hospice, who shared with me what it was like to be inside the whirlwind stirred up by people who used the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo as a political and social volleyball to advance their own unpopular and reckless agenda. There are people—Sean Hannity comes to mind—who, if there is a just god in heaven, should be locked in a room for 20 minutes with Annie Santa Maria, the indomitable woman who works with the patients at the hospice. Only one of them would come out, and it wouldn’t be him.
Question: With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?
Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
Question: Are there any positive signs that we are moving away from Idiot America? If you could create a twelve step program to America back on track, what would be your first suggestion?
Charles P. Pierce: Remember that perception is not reality, that opinion, no matter how widely held, is not fact. An old and wise friend of mine said that the only question that any American citizen is required to answer is “Do you govern or are you governed?” It has to be answered in the former, and that answer has to be continuous. We have to get back to that.
(Photo © Brendan Doris Pierce, 2008)
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives—notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh—endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it. He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified truths that enthrall and impassion millions of Americans. (June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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HSLDA behind denial of service attacks
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The following news is popping up all over the Christian homeschool blog network. These people take pride in their ability to harass whatever government department or individual Farris sees as a target. Here is what one blogger wrote:
Michael Farris, HSLDA Chairman, asked the members to take action by calling the White House and their Congressional leaders, letting them know that they strongly oppose the “anti-family and anti-American treaty”. He also asked that calls be made to Ambassador Susan Rice’s office at the United Nations voicing these concerns.
A few hours after the initial E-lert from HSLDA, another email came through sharing this fantastic news: “The office of UN Ambassador Susan Rice has been inundated with calls! The first phone line we sent out has been completely shut down, and the voice mail system for all of their lines has been crashed.”
Dominionist zealot Farris has used the members of his lobbying group, HSLDA to harass state legislatures around the country and they fear him politically so they cave in when he launches a denial of service attack.
I believe in free speech and I believe in citizens talking to their government representatives, but this is just a bully acting out his power trip. There was absolutely nothing urgent about the activities Susan Rice was engaged in that a polite letter could not have communicated.
If you read the Christian home school blogs the level of bigotry and ignorance you encounter is breathtaking. Farris claims to have 80,000 members. I doubt if one percent of them could hold an intelligent phone conversation with Susan Rice if their life depended on it. But Demagogue Farris speaks to his lemmings in highly loaded emotional language and has all of them foaming at the mouth over the UN CRC ratification. Moreover, they are not calling to actually conduct business. The tactic is nothing more than intimidation.
Perhaps it is time to modify our phone system so that abuse like this cannot be aided by autodialers. Set some limits on the number of times a phone can be autodialed and spread the time out to several hours for each attempt.
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Richard says: The connection between religion and child abuse
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
You actually believe that don’t you? Wow, now it seems as though the whole history of the human race is a sad tale of permanently damaged children. I don’t know how you sleep at night.
+++++++++
Actually, I don’t sleep so well at night and I obviously have not researched the entire history of the human race but you have brought up an important point. What historians tell us about the lives of children past takes a strong stomach to digest. It is a tale of almost casual acceptance of infanticide, murder, rape, slavery, sexual abuse and abandonment. Was this a result of religion? Certainly as far as Christianity goes some of it definitely was and remains so today. The proximate cause: the insidious dogma of original sin and the idea that babies are corrupt the moment they leave their mothers womb. Christian apologists skip over the toxic portions of their bible and vigorously try to downplay them, but original sin is a defining feature of most Christian sects.
Why not redact the bible to get rid of this doctrine? Simply because you cannot eliminate this doctrine and still wind up with Christianity, for many sects. You have to have the fall to make any sense of Jesus, not to mention to explain a womans pain in childbirth. As far as the rest of the toxic verses in the bible, it seems the least Christians could do is add marginalia to call attention to the inappropriateness of these verses. For example, the advice to batter and stone children. That would be a good start. I’ll believe Christians are responsible moral people when they stop shuffling their feet and do something about one of the most horrific books in our libraries. I leave you to ponder: redact or add marginalia?
Today progressive forces are working around the world to put an end to child battering. Who opposes this? In the main, Christians. And please don’t shuck this off on “bad” Christians. The reason parents (and teachers in 20 states) batter their children so freely is contained in the bible which is the common source of guidance for all believers in Christianity. Given holy direction means some parents batter their children with absolutely no sense of guilt, indeed some are proud to announce they are following their Lord. Ruthless twisted people like James Dobson must share the blame.
If religion is to be regarded as such a positive force in human lives, and if our holy books offer the best moral guidance humanity can conceive of, and if these holy books have been around for centuries, why was wanton cruelty extensively visited on children in the past? Historically, religion was far more prevalent as a means of social control than it is now. I mean, if you were so incautious as to say you did not believe, the establishment would cook your a**. Priests carefully attended to those who did not show up on Sundays (maybe they still do). Given these facts, why didn’t the holy books exert the beneficial power modern adherents extravagantly claim for them now? Indeed, examine the world around us today and you will see children pressed into military service, abandoned on the streets, sold into slavery, sexually abused, and murdered with impunity. In the midst of golden temples to religion stocked to the rafters with holy books.
Nick Frost, a professor at Leeds University has chronicled the history of child welfare in his seminal anthology, Child Welfare, Historical Perspectives, portions of which are available on line through Google Books (according to Amazon books, this tome is cited by over 100 other works):
http://www.amazon.com/Child-Welfare-Nick-Frost/dp/book-citations/0415250889
I would guess that most modern people are shocked reading this book and find the facts documented by Nick Frost hard to believe. I have no problem believing what his anthology relates and there is ample evidence the scholarship is well substantiated.
Just last month the Ryan Commission in Ireland released their report. Anyone with a heart is horrified by the details provided in this report. How such despicable treatment of vulnerable children could exist for decades in Catholic institutions should make us all stop and demand some answers. The horrors meted out by Irish Catholic institutions bears witness to what happens when a system has power over people and that system is not answerable to those people. Moreover, when that powerful system refuses to hear the cries of children. Bad Christians? No, I say bad systems. There is undeniable evidence the children tried to escape and tried to get help. Their cries were ignored. Why? Will some practicing Christian please tell me why the cries of the children were ignored? What systemic problem in religion allowed this to happen in modern times.
Here is a taped session of a victim responding to the the Ryan Commission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jHqndf9Kx4
(Read the comments viewers left, this video segment is powerful and some say it may even result in all the Catholic orders in Ireland having their bank accounts frozen.)
Will Kott did the transcript and has this to say:
“A question is asked about the Ryan Commission report on child abuse within institutions run by the religious orders in Ireland. After the panel had spoken the questioner responded and his response…well see for yourself.
Just a note, but my apologies for the ragged nature of the end of the piece. Editing wasn’t very good with the late hour. You can read a transcript here.”
http://willknott.ie/2009/05/26/michael-obrien-transcript/
The Morning After Pill and the Religious Agenda
We in America have been told a lot of lies about sex, reproduction, and sexual health. A recent federal district court ruling in Tummino v. Torti has illuminated at least part of the system of corruption and anti-science religious agenda we’ve been subjected to over the past eight years. Judge Korman ruled that the FDA knowingly engaged in arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking regarding the emergency contraception known as “Plan B,” or the “morning after pill.”
For the rest of this post, I will use the words “religious” and “political” interchangeably. I do so with intent and without apologies. Anyone who doubts that the Bush administration was a theocracy needs to have their head examined. The evidence could not be more clear. At any rate, we should be familiar with the way the religious have pushed their agenda. We got a blueprint from the Shrub himself when he invaded Iraq. First, he stirred up emotional outrage, with the help of an unrelated terrorist attack. Then, he spread lies about the Iraqi government hiding WMDs, and trying to buy yellow cake uranium. Then, he strong-armed congress into doing his will with accusations of Anti-Americanism hanging over the heads of any dissenters.
We can look at the morning after pill agenda and see the same pattern. The emotion is already built into the debate. Since Roe v. Wade, hardly an election has gone by that hasn’t included emotional rhetoric about killing babies, or how godless heathens were turning America into a cesspool of sin and corruption because women were choosing not to allow every fetus the chance to grow into a human. Unlike Iraq, there was no need to steal emotion from somewhere else. The Religious Right has been stirring up emotion for decades.
Step Two is the most important in religious agenda programs. Misinformation is the key. With the morning-after pill, like Iraq, we had to believe that it was connected to a “known evil.” For the religious right, that meant linking the pill to abortion. There are still many people who have believed FOX News and their preachers. They think Plan-B is an abortifacient, and it’s not. The reason the pill only works within 72 hours is that it prevents fertilization. It does not kill an already fertilized egg. It works in essentially the same way as birth control pills. There is no controversy about this. The pill is not an abortion pill. The fact that it was ever called an abortion pill is evidence of the agenda. There was never a scientific reason to give it that name. (There were debunked studies indicating that the pill might be implicated in preventing implantation of fertilized eggs, but these studies were, as I said, not borne out by good science.) The United States, which grudgingly approved Plan B by prescription only, is the only country in the modern world which doesn’t have multiple legal options for emergency contraception.
The original request for OTC (over-the-counter) status for Plan B was submitted in 2001. The FDA found that it met all of the criteria for OTC, but a single doctor (at the behest of “political forces” stalled the approval process by citing “safety concerns” including whether or not people would be likely to use Plan B instead of the pill, or whether average women are smart enough to figure out how to take a single dose pill within 72 hours of having unprotected sex. (This, despite evidence from all over the world that women are indeed smart enough to figure it out, and piles of evidence indicating that women prefer birth control pills to Plan-B, given the choice.) After five years of debating “safety concerns” such as these, the FDA denied OTC availability. The decision was largely based on an “Advisory Committee” that was appointed with careful oversight by the Bush administration. Instead of finding highly qualified doctors, scientists, and pharmacists, the government’s stated goal was to create a “balance of opinion” on the committee. In case you are living in an alternate universe, this is political double-speak for “We were trying to change the decision based on non-scientific grounds.”
Let’s not make light of these facts. Unfortunately for the religious, the facts themselves are now incontrovertible. Even taking into account the incredibly unreasonable desire of the religious right to impose their religion on everybody, Plan B is not an abortion-inducing drug. It is functionally no different than the birth control pill, which is legal everywhere in America. There is not one single scientific reason why it should not be made available over the counter. Not one. The only objections to the pill have been religious in nature, but as they are wont to do, the religious have hidden their agenda under levels of thinly veiled concerns for “public safety.”
For those of my readers who think I’m too hard on religious moderates, take this as an example of why I must be so. This religious imposition onto non-religious Americans can only be defended on religious grounds. For anyone who believes that America is a country where religion and government must be separate, the only possible response to this situation has to be outrage. But… where was the moderate religious outrage? I’ll tell you. The religious moderate outrage over the morning after pill was virtually non-existent. Apart from a few Lutherans in Boston and a couple of Unitarians in Nebraska, it appears that nearly the entire body of believers in America sat by silently while science was mocked and the Constitution trampled.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Most moderates will never stand up against fundamentalists. They will not side with us evil atheists because this is not about living together peacefully. It’s about religion versus science. As I wrote yesterday, the intellectual battle has been won. There is no debate between creation/evolution, and there ought not be a debate over either abortion rights or the morning after pill. Intelligent Design has no place in any school. The only argument against abortion rights is religious, and so it should be immediately dismissed without further comment. The morning-after pill is safe and functional. Any religious moderate who is not standing actively against any religious zealot trying to impose his will on me or any of my fellow American atheists is complicit in America’s descent into theocracy.
Oakland Politics:: US Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum Discuss Parental Rights
US Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum Discuss Parental Rights
by: laryholland
Sun Mar 22, 2009 at 19:41:00 PM EDT
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US Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum Discuss Parental Rights on Get Your Justice Live
Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) discusses his upcoming reintroduction of the former Parental Rights Amendment from 2008 into the 111th Congress. The Congressman confirmed that efforts from citizens are working with an increase from 24 co-sponsors to 54 co-sponsors to the proposed Parental Rights Amendment. Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, will be on an upcoming episode. We were also joined by Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Form. Congressman Hoekstra stated very clearly that “I don’t want anybody coming between the parents and the kids, and creating a barrier.”
The language is simple: “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.“ The Congressman demonstrated clear examples of where parents make a better caregiver than the government. Congressman Hoekstra further said that one of the causes of the erosion of our parental rights is government growth, “Men of zeal who lack understanding,” people that basically mean well but who lack understanding. It is imperative that we protect our parental rights from both domestic and international government intrusions, but that means discussing our concerns consistently with our government officials.
To listen to interview in its entirety, visit the linked title.
US Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum Discuss Parental Rights on Get Your Justice Live
laryholland :: US Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum Discuss Parental Rights
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Until the 1980s homeschooling was a benign activity that effected very few children. After homeschooling became dominated by right wing Christian theocrats perhaps a million vulnerable children (estimates are suspect because of poor reporting requirements) became virtual prisoners in their own homes, pawns in a scheme to overthrow the United States government and replace it with a theocracy. The theocrats scheme includes lobbying state legislatures, pressing free exercise of religion cases in the courts and collusion with extreme right wing Republican officials. About 50 US Congress persons in the Bush were thought to be dominionists. Many of them are still serving. The result is an almost total lack of oversight by government officials. It will require a new administration to undo the Bush administration handiwork.
The Supreme Court gave parents the right to teach children the tenets and the practices of their faith back in 1944. (Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 164 (1944). The Prince decision, together with the Yoder vs Wisconsin decision inspired theocratic zealots to create a rebellious strain of home schooling. Lead by radicals, this movement is creating a virtual fifth column of ignorant children raised to hate democracy and to revile and distrust their government institutions. In this way, the theocrats are systematically grooming innocent children through a staged process involving homeschools, a project called Generation Joshua and the Patrick Henry College. There aim is to quietly infiltrate, hamper, frustrate and then dismantle the government of the United States and establish a theocracy according to Dominionist theology. The theocrats plan seems to be working because the Bush administration opened the doors of government to Patrick Henry College graduates while the general public has taken little notice. But then, the devious theocrats are anything but honest and above board. They are like cockroaches, termites and other vermin that hide out of sight.
No one contemplated the political power radical right wing Christians would usurp in the latter decades of the 20st century. Nor, how they would first systematically attack the public school system and then in frustration, how they would begin to withdraw their children from public schools in astonishing numbers. Able to mobilize thousands of parents to swamp legislatures with calls and emails they steam rolled their agenda into laws across the country. There was little or no opposition from the federal or state governments because GW Bush was in collusion with this effort.
With children constantly supervised by zealous parents, the indoctrination of their backward debauched religion can take place 24 hours a day seven days a week. Out of sight, the indoctrination goes unnoticed. The unfortunate children’s parents rigorously shield them from civilian authority, and they are not allowed to associate with anyone that has not been pre-approved. Parents heavily monitor and restrict radio, television, movies, the Internet and live entertainment events. When legal problems threaten, parents use the threadbare guise of sacrosanct religious liberty and call on well heeled advocacy groups like Michael Ferris’s Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), Focus on the Family, The Pacific Justice Institute, and The Eagle Forum to name just a few far right advocacy groups of dubious character.
In these families, there will be no nonsense about gender equality, or sex education or tolerance of other’s beliefs; parents are convinced they alone have the truth and all outsiders are Satan’s spawn that are going to hell. There is no effort to teach the children how to reason or make moral judgments based on logic; morality lessons consist of picked over biblical dogma. This trend has been in place for nearly 20 years and has spawned a vast infrastructure of lobbyists, legal assistance groups, and purveyors of “approved” curriculum materials. Many curriculum materials advertise that they teach subjects in a “godly”way. Believe it or not there are even teaching materials that extend this pedagogy to mathematics!
Rob Reich (Associate Professor of Political Science and Ethics at Stanford University ) explains what he considers is the major problem in terms of parents deliberately frustrating the development of autonomy in their children:
“The problem with homeschooling and parental authority over education arises not out of conflicts over whether children should become independent adults. Few people wish to defend the authority of parents who plainly care too little. The problem arises over parents who, as it were, care too much in seeking to prevent the development of autonomy in their children. I mean to suggest that parents who wish to control the socialization of their children so completely as to instill inerrant beliefs in their own worldview or unquestioning obedience to their own or others’ authority are motivated often by a fervent care for, not neglect of their children.
Even when defined minimally, some parents may object to the idea that their children should receive an education that promotes their critical thinking and capacities for reflection on their own and other’s ends. Being minimally autonomous, I claimed, was in the interest of the child for personal and civic reasons. The fact that autonomy is necessary for citizenship makes education for autonomy an interest of the state as well. Thus, when parents reject the facilitation of autonomy in their children, they find themselves in conflict with both the interests of the child and of the state.”
A measure of just how thoroughly the theocrats have taken control of the US Department of Education can be gained by the comments made by Jack Klenk, Director of the Office of Non Public Education at the U.S. Department of Education at a recent meeting sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA a vociferous foe of homeschool oversight ) and featuring eight congressional representatives . Here is part of the HSLDA report on their web site:
“Mr. Klenk has served in the Department for over 20 years, and he talked about how he has seen homeschooling start and grow through the years. He also acknowledged that the Department of Education has heard the homeschool community’s message that the “federal government must leave homeschoolers alone,” and will honor that message. He closed by sharing his and the current administration’s belief that “homeschooling is good for children, good for families, and good for society. ”
Have we no right to expect impartial judgments emanating from such a high government official? Mr Klenk should enjoy his job while it lasts because the Obama administration will see to it that he will be among the first to be shown the door.
The corrupt Bush administration and his allied theocrats were determined to surreptitiously undermine and drag down the government of the United States. Accordingly, it should be obvious to Americans that the new administration must act decisively to regulate homeschools on an urgent basis. Rob Reich has proposed the following provisional framework:
“A PROVISIONAL REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR HOME SCHOOLING
Recall that the purpose of these regulations is to help ensure that the state’s interest in providing a civic education for children is met, and to protect the independent interest of the child in developing into a free or autonomous adult. … I propose three minimal regulations. The results of the democratic process might yield additional regulations, which would not necessarily be inconsistent with my views, but these seem to me the bare minimum, as follows:1. All parents who home school must register with a public official. The state needs to be able to distinguish between truants and home-schooled students, and it needs a record that specific children are being home schooled so that its other regulations can be enforced.
2. Parents must demonstrate to educational officials that their homeschool curriculum meets some minimal standard. The minimal standard will include academic benchmarks as well as an assurance that children are exposed to and engaged with ideas, values, and beliefs that are different from those of the parents. For instance, every home-school curriculum should include information about a variety of religious traditions (I believe this should be the case, as well, for public and private schools.) Parents are free to teach their children that their own religious faith is the truth, but they cannot shield children from the knowledge that other people have different convictions and that these people are, from the standpoint of citizenship, their equals.
3. Parents must permit their children to be tested periodically on some kind of basic skills exam. Should home-schooled children repeatedly fail to make progress on this exam, relative to their public or private school peers, then a case could be made to compel school attendance. Label this educational harm. (The same kind of educational harm surely exists in some public schools, of course. And this is one reason that I believe parents should have the authority to hold the state accountable for public schools by pulling their children from failing schools and enrolling them elsewhere.) In short, these regulations amount to the following:
The state registers who is being home schooled. The state insists upon a curriculum that meets minimal academic standards and that introduces students to value pluralism. The state tests students periodically to ensure that minimal academic progress is being made. Would many home schools be unable to meet these regulations? …. If creating and enforcing regulations would prevent even a few children from suffering educational harm or from receiving an education that stunted or disabled their freedom, the regulations would be worthwhile. Strictly enforced regulations ensure that parents do not wield total and unchecked authority over the education of their children. What is at stake here is not a question of social utility or stability, whether home schooling could threaten democracy. What is at stake is the justice that we owe children, that they receive an education that cultivates their future citizenship, their individual freedom, and that teaches them at least basic academic skills, skills that are necessary for ably exercising both their citizenship and their freedom.”
I wish I could be as sanguine as Rob Reich, because our democracy could clearly be at risk if millions of compromised children continue to go through this warped system. In addition, why settle for minimum standards?
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Canadians show us how it is done
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Senator Barbara Boxer and Sec of State Hillary Clinton are working to get the UN CRC treaty ratified in the next 60 days. The far right Christian fascists at Home School Legal Defense Association and ParentalRights.org are pumping out reams of misinformation to the thousands of people who hang on every word they publish. In turn, members of these groups cut and paste the propaganda they receive and flood the web with propaganda. The organizations are using this issue to raise money and will rake in millions with their divisive ill advised, self serving political strategy. They actually are trying to convince people that they can amend the US Constitution to “protect” parental rights. Representative Pete Hoekstra is the prime congressional mover and he has rounded up about 60 cosponsors.
To see the truth of how the treaty is being implemented, we have an example to study of how Canada is going about the implementation process. Each article in the treaty has to be analyzed and then supporting legislation is passed to bring state law into compliance with the objectives in the treaty. Contrary to the lies of the HSLDA no group of bureaucrats in Geneva sits around dreaming up laws that control people in the states which sign the treaty.
One of the things that the UN CRC is very clear about is physical violence against children, otherwise known as spanking, swatting, or other such euphemisms. A Canadian web site explains how Canada is changing their laws to make all forms of hitting children, illegal wherever they may be. Not only that, but mental abuse is also outlawed.
Children are separate people entitled to human rights. What a concept.
Here is the preamble to the Canadian legislation:
BILL S-207 and the UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children: Submission to Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights
Summary
The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children urges the honourable members of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights to ensure that Canada’s international and domestic human rights obligations are brought to bear in its review of Bill S-207. In particular, the Coalition draws attention to the findings of the recent UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the committee’s own review of Canada’s obligations with regard to the rights of children. If these are taken into consideration, it would be difficult to find other than support for Bill S-207 and [to] move forward to ensure that Canada’s Criminal Code protects all Canadian citizens – including its youngest, smallest and most vulnerable – from all forms of violence.
Violence in its myriad forms is universally condemned under international human rights law. But corporal punishment is a form of violence that persists in the everyday lives of children worldwide. In some States, it is a sanctioned practice by government agencies and bodies (e.g., in education, justice and child welfare systems). In others, it is permitted by legislation and persists in families.
The UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children recognizes corporal punishment as a form of violence, and asserts that violence against children administered as “discipline” or “correction” must cease to be condoned, authorized or regulated in domestic law if States are to uphold their human rights obligations.
The key messages of the Study, which are reflected in the recommendations, are:
(a) No violence against children is justifiable. Children should never receive less protection than adults.
(b) All violence against children is preventable. States must build a protective legislative environment and invest in evidence-based policies and programs to address factors that give rise to violence against children.
(c) States have the primary responsibility to uphold children’s rights to protection and access to services, and to support families’ capacity to provide children with care in a safe environment.
(d) States have the obligation to ensure accountability in every case of violence.
(e) The vulnerability of children to violence is linked to their age and evolving capacity.
(f) Children have the right to express their views, and to have these views taken into account in the implementation of policies and programs.
“The Study should mark a turning point – an end to adult justification of violence against children, whether accepted as “tradition” or disguised as “discipline”.
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Independent Expert, UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence Against Children
Here is the web site site where you can read more about how Canada is implementing the requirements of the convention.
A similar legislative process will take place in the United States as the various articles of the convention are implemented. The democracies of Europe are all working on implementing this treaty, not to mention dozens of countries around the world. A few countries have met all the legal requirements and have obtained the status of accession.
Here in the United States 200 religious organizations and NGOs support ratification and implementation of the UN CRC. Who is against it? The Southern Baptist Convention and the HSLDA.
Very soon the tykes up in Canada will be free of mis-informed, mis guided parents who still think they are lord and master of their domain and can do as they please to their children. That day cannot come too soon for our own children.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
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The following is an excerpt of an article by Chris Hedges that appears here:
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
The [Christian fascist] movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or “intelligent design,” like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include “intelligent design” and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort “nihilistic relativism” although a better phrase might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon, taught as a theory in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas. “Intelligent design” is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah’s ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah’s ark, not one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this assault when he said that the killings had taken place “because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud.” (speech Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
“What convinces masses are not facts,” Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, “and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the “masses” inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time.” (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend schools run by the Christian Right. These “Christian” schools saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon, had outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart “activist judges” who wanted to overturn them.The Christian family, even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have “values,” would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote “positive” Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah’s voice.The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ’s message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem. Let us, if nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the Freeway: America ’s Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is published by The Free Press.
Note from Joan Bokaer – Chris refers to a memo I received in Iowa from Pat Robertson’s organization. The year was 1986 — two years before his presidential bid, and three years before the Christian Coalition was formed.
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