Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill<\/a> on Thursday, in a move that guarantees that the religious liberty of California residents who send their kids to public schools will be violated.\u00a0 But, the effects will be felt throughout the entire country\u2019s public school systems.<\/p>\nI\u2019m the product of public schools, where I learned about dangling participles, Davy Crockett, and the safest way to carry a shot gun through a forest on hunting expeditions.\u00a0 (No exaggeration \u2013 in 7th grade, one semester of science was exclusively hunter\u2019s safety.)\u00a0 Our modest, rural schools weren\u2019t flashy, but we were educated well enough that my husband \u2013 who attended Kentucky public schools \u2014 thrived at Harvard Law School and I held my own at New York University.<\/p>\n
When we had our own kids, we sent our daughter to public school and congratulated ourselves for not spending as much money for kindergarten as the annual Gross National Product of Kazakhstan. I told one parent \u201cI\u2019ll teach your toddler to identify yellow in exchange for your $14,000 tuition.\u201d\u00a0 Even more than avoiding private school\u2019s price, I believed the racial, financial, and religious diversity of public school was good for her general education.<\/p>\n
On our first day, I nervously walked her into the concrete playground and worried she wouldn\u2019t eat her lunch quickly enough or grasp the complicated art of shoe-tying.\u00a0 But after surviving the first tearful week, her year was marked with the typical joys of school \u2014 visiting the fire station and playing the first blonde mother of Martin Luther King Jr. in the school play.\u00a0 Then, about half-way through the year, the Philadelphia Public School system began using a curriculum that advocates moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual parents.\u00a0 This gave me pause.\u00a0 While I wanted her to be around people of all faiths, I didn\u2019t want the schools to undermine our own.\u00a0 A religious Jew with a daughter at the school successfully convinced our school not to teach this curriculum, but the public school \u201cculture war\u201d was just beginning.<\/p>\n
When we sent her to a magnet school, they only allowed a politically correct version of the Pledge of Allegiance from the intercom every day, deleting \u201cunder God\u201d so no one \u2013 except Americans who believe in the democratically-decided Pledge \u2013 would be offended.\u00a0 Teachers wore \u201cJohn Kerry for President\u201d buttons during class and the art projects on the walls declared \u201cAmericans hate George Bush because he is a liar.\u201d\u00a0 Additionally, the school system proudly proclaimed October as \u201cGay and Lesbian History Month\u201d on the school calendars it sent home to the families of its students.<\/p>\n
Gov. Brown\u2019s bill is only the most recent \u2013 and dramatic \u2013 example of public schools going awry. But just because you live in America\u2019s heartland, don\u2019t think you are protected from this kind of teaching in your schools.\u00a0 First of all, the nation\u2019s worst cultural ideas usually are born in the larger urban areas, and then they slowly encroach upon America\u2019s heartland.\u00a0 Secondly, many book publishers \u2013 because of the large size of California\u2019s population \u2014 customize their textbooks to meet California\u2019s standards.\u00a0 Especially in this economy, textbook manufacturers will not want to make books for each state.\u00a0 More than likely, this is headed toward your children.<\/p>\n
What can we learn from Gov. Brown and the Bizarro World of the public school system? That they are not encumbered by a pesky little thing called the United States Constitution. For Christians, the establishment clause has been wrongly used to establish a \u201cwall of separation between church and state.\u201d\u00a0 Teachers, for example, cannot (and should not) explicitly promote Christianity in public schools.\u00a0\u00a0 But for liberals, the establishment clause is meaningless.\u00a0 Their ideas are considered \u201csecular,\u201d even though the scope of modern liberalism encompasses almost every area of life \u2013 from sexuality to family to poverty and race relations.\u00a0 Therefore, they\u2019re able to launch a complete assault on almost everything a Christian student believes, and there\u2019s nothing a parent or the courts can do to stop them.<\/p>\n
The bottom line is this: both the Left and the Right hold political world views with the same amount of religious intensity, yet only one side is allowed to use a branch of the government to promote their viewpoint.<\/p>\n
By the time California\u2019s Governor signed this into law this week, we had already packed our backpacks and headed to a private Christian school in Tennessee.\u00a0 I like to say that this is the second religious school she\u2019s attended.\u00a0 The first \u2013 run by the Philadelphia Public School System \u2013 taught her reading, \u2018riting, \u2018rithmetic, and the ideology of the Left.\u00a0 The second \u2013 run by Zion Presbyterian Church<\/a> \u2013 teaches her reading, \u2018riting, \u2018rithmetic, and the worldview of Christianity.<\/p>\nThis means we\u2019re faced with large monthly tuition bills to cover her private education, but the price of public education was just more than we could afford.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On January 1st, California public schools will be required to teach children about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in their social sciences curriculum.\u00a0 Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill on Thursday, in a move that guarantees that the religious liberty of California residents who send their kids to public schools will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[65,66,18],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-homosexuality","tag-public-education","tag-religious-liberty"],"yoast_head":"\n
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