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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Damn It, Toto, Who Wants to Be in Kansas?!?

By John Pieret

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Hopefully, most of the residents of Alameda, California don't:

I'M BEGINNING TO feel like Dorothy when she and Toto landed in Oz. I don't think I'm in Alameda any more.
No, it feels more like Kansas"... or Texas, or any of the other states where the religious right tried to take over school boards in the 1990s. Then, they didn't want their children taught that Darwin was right. Substitute "homosexuality" for "evolution" and you understand their current obsession.
Two well-funded conservative political action groups ? the Capitol Resource Institute and the Pacific Justice Institute ? have decided to make Alameda the next beachhead in their culture war by bankrolling the recall and the lawsuit. Pacific Justice Institute has already extorted money from the Castro Valley schools by making them settle a bogus lawsuit to avoid an expensive and time-consuming legal defense.

The recall referred to is an effort to oust three Alameda school board members who had the temerity to support curriculum that aims to curb anti-gay bullying by teaching a course aimed at to breaking down stereotypes and educating children about different types of families.

As the writer of the above Letter to the Editor, Allan Mann, points out, the hypocrisy involved in the opposition is evident:

The leader of the recall effort, Pastor Dion Evans, claimed initially that he opposed the anti-bullying curriculum because it did not address bullying of other protected groups. But now that the school board has wisely decided to expand the curriculum to do just that, he's not dropping his opposition. At least those behind the lawsuit are being honest: "I'm opposed to teaching my child that homosexuality is morally acceptable," said one of the parents bringing the suit.

Naturally, the best way to do that is to keep your children ignorant of the fact that there are homosexuals and that they are people too. And if they or their children are bullied in school, well, I guess that's just the wages of sin.

You may remember the Pacific Justice Institute, which took "Lawsuit Larry" Caldwell's frivolous case against the U.C. Berkeley Understanding Evolution website.

Let's hope they have all the same success in this case as they did with Caldwell's.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 11, 2009 (boomark / email).