In case you've been under a rock, Missouri has passed a "right to pray" bill. It passed by an overhwhelming majority. The details are here, but basically it restates that school children can pray and acknowledge god. This event is just one of many regarding schools and religion. You may have heard of Jessica Alquist, a student in Texas who petitioned a pray banner to be removed from her high school. Or of the bill that bassed that allows public dollars in Louisiana to send children to evolution rejecting, creationists schools.
In a nutshell, it's been a crazy run with schools and religion, primarily Christianity.
Now, you can believe whatever the hell you want. But there are rules:
- Don't shove it down my throat
- Don't Fuck with other people's freedoms
- Don't force other's children to it
And shockingly, the freedom might be freedom from hearing fundamentalist religion. Sadly, these assholes are forgetting something, like the first amendment. It's not like you have to search hard to find this one. It's the first one. It reads, exactly:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So it does protect religions from being discriminated against. However it also protects people from religion as well. This isn't some obscure text analysis. It's pretty plain black and white. You can have a religion, but it should not be made into law in a school. We also have a little thing called, I don't know, separation of church and state. So technically, the bullshit with Louisiana school vouchers is utterly unconstitutional. Yeah, public money is going into christianity? What if you're jewish, muslim, or something else?
Some people didn't realize that the vouchers could go for other religions. Like the people who voted for it to pass. Rep. Valerie Hodges, was shocked to find out the the vouchers she voted for were also going to fun muslim schools. And what did she have to say?
I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America's Founding Father's religion, which is christianity, in public schools, or private schools.
There's lost of, well, bullshit in that sentence. In fact, it should get a reward for most bullshit/fewest words category. You know, since the founding fathers strived for separation of church and state and the fact many of them were not christian in the way many think it. There's a lot of propaganda on that one. But the truth lies in actual writings of many of the Fathers. And there's also The Faiths of the Founding Fathers which treats the subject very well, in my opinion.
Either way, this is insane. And when parents and law makers aren't illegally putting religion in school, they're homeschooling religion. Again, it's your right to teach religion. But there's a difference between teaching religion and outright disregard for well tested information in science. Like this. Blatant disregard for science and critical thinking like this is why the dark ages happened.
Again. You can believe what you want. However, you need to accept science. If you want to think a creator mad the Big Bang, or somehow jumpstarted the history of the world, that's cool, because we don't know what happened that long ago. If you believe people cozied with dinosaurs, bones are here to test us, and evolution is bullshit, well, that's fine too.
But don't dare teach that lack of critical thinking and reasoning to a child, cause then you're an asshole.
