Think it's an exaggeration when I (and many others) have pointed out how today's teabagging Republican party wants to gut education, diseducate our kids, and turn our country into a theocracy?
The fear-mongering in the Family Research Council’s latest mailing starts on the envelope:
“Beginning THIS MONTH…they don’t want any American child to escape. Read how we can STOP them.”
“They” turns out to be “government-run schools” and the “radical” teachers that infest them.
If a foreign enemy had plotted to infiltrate America, I’m not sure an army of undercover subversives could have done more damage than our government-run schools…. Leftists don’t want a single American child to escape their thought control. And they are crowding out true education.
Of course, Perkins has a skewed idea about what a “true education” includes. He complains that America used to be the tops in science – after all we put a man on the moon. But not any more:
Today’s science classes often feature big-government political propaganda, taking time and focus away from true science. Not to mention attacks on the Bible and arrogant censoring of any theories like intelligent design that challenge their Darwinism.I think this is deeply pernicious, and we ignore it at our own risk. Who's "we?" Anyone who's not a science-denying, education-fearing, theocracy-aspiring American. Anyone who's not a white native-born fundamentalist Christian male.
Honestly, I have no way of accurately assessing the danger; the degree to which people like Tony Perkins and so many others have the ability to make things work their way. But I do know they're infinitely patient, astonishingly well-financed, and, whether or not they represent a majority -- or even a plurality -- of voters, they have enough Congressfolk in their bag, and enough gerrymandered districts that'll keep them being elected, to do plenty of damage. If not in terms of achieving their ultimate agenda everywhere, at least in terms of doing so in many states; and in terms of obstructing the will of the majority, and legislative progress, in Congress. Elsewhere, in those laboratories of democracy knowns as states, they're increasingly taking over state and local school boards. City councils. Places where elections are decided by zealots.
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