Why Professor, you astonish me. A group of people in a local jurisdiction propose to do something of which you disapprove, and you want to haul them into federal court (and call them a mob, to boot). I can see it now: the Professor awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare of pine-tar torches, pitchforks, and hemp ropes, and of being pursued by rubes who want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, and who will encourage them to marry their first cousins. That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’
What was the complaint, in the first place, that generated this particular variation on the thread? Someone was lamenting the fact that “people in classrooms hearing about intelligent design,” more than anything else, would be made into a political issue. Fate sealed the destiny on that circumstance way back whenever we put government in charge of education. If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.
We had a little discussion a couple of weeks ago with a couple of Christian Reconstructionists, a group who want to throw out parts of the constitution, institute a theocracy, and introduce stoning for homosexuals, adulterers and disobedient children, exactly as laid out in the Bible. These adherents of CR happen also to be vocal creationists.
So, yeah, I do take them seriously. Three hundred years ago we were hanging witches in this country. I'm sorry, but a significant number of your co-religionists seem to have moved not a bit from the mind set that permitted those horrors.
The Discovery Institute have said, in writing, that the teaching of ID in schools is a wedge strategy to get the teaching of religion into schools. Why wouldn't I take them at their word? Why should I trust instead the reassurances of someone I suspect of dissimulating his real motives?
That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’
The Professor, since he knows a little history, remembers that fundamentalist Christians in this country were until recently Democrats who voted for statist economic policies. Now he has to endure being lectured by these johnny-come-latelys about what a conservative is.
If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.
With the massive assumption of federal control of education at the behest of the current President, a little judicial oversight of school districts scarcely seems worth worrying about. In any case, this battle was lost when the 14th amendment was passed. The US Bill of Rights is now binding on the states. You can't go back 150 years to the aftermath of the civil war, any more than you can go back 300 years to theocracy.