Part of the deal with libertarianism, in my experience, is that you get to embrace the “me first” economic school while still holding your nose about those churchy rubes in mainstream conservatism. You get all of that welfare mother hating without that anti-science, apocalyptic aftertaste. The only problem is that you always end up supporting social conservatives anyway. I can’t tell you how many people have acted all hurt and offended when I point out that the Koch brothers are just garden variety Republicans. Also too, libertarians get offended when you point out that, however many position papers they published on the police state, Cato’s biggest effect on the world is to elect Republicans– and there’s nothing the GOP likes as much as unfettered police power. It’s tense, is what I’m saying.
One issue that libertarians and social conservatives can always agree on is voucher schools, right? Get the government out of our government schools! Let the benevolent power of the market fix all of our problems. Including the problem where our students are taught that the massacre of American Indians and the Klan weren’t so cool. From Indian Country:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program to privatize public education has come under fire recently for spending state tax dollars to teach Bible-based curriculum. An August 7 post on MotherJones.com, a news outlet covering the 2012 elections, took a look at the program and 14 “wacky facts” kids will learn under the state’s new program.
One of those “facts” is that “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.” The tidbit comes from a 1994 A Beka Book, which offers Christian education materials, titled America: Land I Love.
Another “fact” the schools will teach is that the Ku Klux Klan “in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.” That information comes from United States History for Christian Schools (Bob Jones University Press, 2001).
Bubblegum Tate
Has anybody else been reading the Wonkette postings every Sunday summarizing/quoting wingnut homeschooler textbooks? They’re hilarious and sad.
Maude
State money and religion don’t mix. I hope Jindal gets in trouble.
Narcissus
When you believe in a glorious, mythical palingenetic past, that past can have no flaws.
BGinCHI
Plus the Klan had a salutary effect on the white cotton sheet industry. Not to mention the small business wooden cross makers, rope twisters, and sap makers.
A small business engine, the Klan.
Sly
One of Jesus’s many overlooked miracles was turning ethnic cleansing into lemonade.
Maude
@BGinCHI:
Fuel and matches
Villago Delenda Est
“Christian” is a misnomer in these cases.
“Jeebofascist fucktards” is much more accurate.
scav
Funny they don’t mention the anti-Catholic bias of certain areas of the Klan. . .
BGinCHI
Shorter revisionist historians:
Hey, those black people weren’t going to hang themselves.
jonas
“in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies.”
Strictly speaking, this is true. Although for some reason I suspect a textbook providing a similarly nuanced image of the Taliban or Hamas wouldn’t get the same approval. I wonder why…
scav
@BGinCHI: They why do they expect the Mexicans to self-deport? Must be because of the self-bagging technology of the 21st century. Automation; Outsourcing, the joys thereof. Things were just soooo labor-intensive in those olden golden days of yore.
YellowJournalism
@Bubblegum Tate: Hilarious and sad. Loved the attack on Dickinson.
jonas
@Sly: Oh, absolutely. Didn’t you know that slavery was a blessing in disguise? Sure a few people got kidnapped, endured the brutality of the Middle Passage, and were violently pressed into labor on plantations while their families were torn apart and sold like livestock. But how else would they have come to Jesus? And now America even has a real African president! Yay!
JPL
Louisiana has always valued it’s low property taxes over schools. It’s not new and those who think it is are fooling themselves. Public schools have always been for the have nots.
geg6
This is a disgrace. Just a disgrace. The people of Louisiana are getting rolled by the fundies. This is insane.
If I lived in Louisiana, I’d be fucking furious. I’d be marching in the streets.
Maude
@geg6:
It is so outside the laws.
1badbaba3
@BGinCHI: @Maude:
Job creators.
Steeplejack
@scav:
And anti-Semitic. KKK = “no kikes, kolored or Katholics.”
JPL
@geg6: It has been this way for decades. As long as property taxes are used to fund education it will be that way.
Anya
Future wingut homeschoolers will be LITERALLY the death of America as we know it — and folks, I mean that sincerely. I mean, Bobby Jindal is a nice fellow who cares about his family, but folks, he is literally destroying America …. I’m not joking.
Maude
@JPL:
In LA, but in NJ, that’s not the case.
geg6
@Maude:
Not only is it blasting a hole in the idea of the separation of church and state, I am of the opinion that this is a form of child abuse. These children are getting a completely substandard education and it’s a deliberate plan to make education a joke and to brainwash an entire generation. Using tax dollars to do it. It’s sick. It’s scary. It’s fascistic. I consider these people traitorous, in that they don’t believe in the Constitution or liberal (in the more classic political science definition of the world) representative democracy. They are subversives, seeking to turn this country into something unrecognizable as the United States of America.
jonas
@JPL: Yup. One of the great things about the US public school system is that states and local communities get to have a say in what their schools do. One of the great drawbacks of the US public school system is that states and local communities get to have a say in what their schools do.
If you have a state run by reasonable people, it’s fine. If your state is run by lunatic religious ideologues, you get, well, Louisiana.
Maude
@geg6:
THIS
JPL
@geg6: When my family moved to CT our property taxes were higher a month than for the entire year in LA. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s assumed that you would use your funds for private schools. Now that was also a time that if I wanted to serve as a juror, I would have to register since I’m a female.
A pediatrician that my sons went to in another state quizzed me on LA’s law because her daughter was trying to get a divorce at the time and she just couldn’t believe a state could be so archaic.
Walker
Except that in the south, private schools ae not elite pre schools of learning. They are places you go to so you do not have to go to school with those people.
burnspbesq
If I were McDonalds, this would worry me. An entire generation of Louisianans too uneducated to flip burgers? Whatever shall we do?
? Martin
@geg6: You have to understand – no proper white family sent their kids to public schools after 1965. All decisions related to taxation and education in the state derive from that observation. If you burn down all the public schools, well, that only hurts the black kids and whites too lazy to homeschool. No biggie.
geg6
@JPL:
Perhaps I don’t understand what’s gone on in education in LA, but since PA also funds education with property taxes, I don’t think this particular plan is the common reaction to property tax rates.
It is true in every state that there are differences among the performances of schools depending on the socio-economic status of the student body. This is true of even private schools. And people bitch about funding education, regardless of the mechanism a state uses to fund it. It seems to me that this is different than the usual reaction.
This seems to be a plan to use that typical antipathy among the public to fund education to subvert education and dumb down the populace. I find very sinister. Makes me happy that I live in PA where Dover crushed creationism in the schools for a good long time and not in LA where they are tripling down on unconstitutionality and on teaching fairy tales, racist apologia, and lack of critical thinking.
jonas
@geg6: It goes to the fact that religious conservatives realize they’ve lost any semblance of control over popular culture and society at large. Men and women cohabit before marriage and without shame. Homosexuals can legally marry in a number of states. Most women work outside the home. Young people think it’s lame to be homophobic. We have a president whose middle name is Hussein. It’s Rick Santorum’s nightmare. The only thing they have left is the coercive power of the state. If they can *legislate* their beliefs, then they can retain some modicum of control over people’s lives. Hence the increasingly frantic rhetoric about the whole “separation of church and state” thing being a liberal myth.
Shalimar
If you have read the Old Testament, you already knew God is an asshole. So, no surprise.
burnspbesq
@Maude:
It sure was when I was growing up in Ridgewood. Every April, my parents and all our neighbors dutifully trooped to the polls to approve the school budget and the gruesome property taxes that paid for a nationally-known school system.
danielx
Color me surprised.
And FYWP.
Maude
@burnspbesq:
The property taxes here are enormous. A lot of houses for sale.
Christie has gone after the teacher unions, but hasn’t tried to put religion into the schools. Too many wealthy people of other religions wouldn’t stand for it.
Brian Williams used to live in Ridgewood.
Whenever there’s a money question to vote for, I vote no.
JPL
@geg6: When I lived there they followed Napoleanic Law. They were challenged in the courts and changed it so females could sign up for jury duty. In the seventies, since I was married I could not open a credit card under my name. They had great food though.
JPL
I’d love lamb’s comments about LA law though.
Peregrinus
@Maude:
I never get tired of mentioning that my sophomore-year roommate was a guy from Ridgewood who thought Obama was born in Kenya and didn’t see the point of gay marriage unless it was explained to him how it would boost the economy.
Somehow I survived. I don’t know how, ’cause I didn’t start drinking until the year after that.
balconesfault
The best facts that money can buy!
Maude
@Peregrinus:
Yep. It’s all about that money.
I’m in an affluent county. The main problem besides drugs at the local high schools is gambling.
jonas
@burnspbesq: NY last year passed a property tax increase cap (2%) that a lot of people were very happy about, but that also completely screwed over a lot of school districts who now can’t make up the shortfall in state subsidies with any local tax increases, which, outside a few very wealthy areas of suburban NYC, would have been squeezing blood from turnips anyway. On top of that, these strapped districts, many with shrinking enrollments, are on still the hook for pension and retiree benefits from back when things were more flush. It’s really, really bad.
Peregrinus
@Maude:
Heh. I teach at a private school, and we recently forbade card games on campus precisely because the boys figure out ways to gamble. Even if we forbid it at the table, they’ll remember debts.
I mentioned the demographic skews GOP there, right?
Maude
@Peregrinus:
Same here in this place.
NJ is in real financial trouble and Christie was out playing jolly with Steve King.
burnspbesq
@Maude:
Not to mention that even though Christie’s kid could have gone to West Windsor-Plainsoboro South, a very good public high school, your tax dollars were spent to have the State Police drive him up to Delbarton in Morristown every day. It’s okay to trash the public schools as long as his own kids aren’t using them. Fuckin’ Christie: like Giuliani, a perfectly competent U.S. Attorney with delusions of grandeur. >spits on ground.<
El Cid
Well, in fairness, God was nicer by killing many Indians in the Trail of Tears than drowning them all in the cold, cold waters of the rainy depths, which He did one other time when He was pissed about who was worshiping whom.
Svensker
@burnspbesq:
Still is in NJ. And those taxes were something fierce. Good schools, though.
Let me amend that. Good schools in the well off towns.
Miss Waterlow
Hey, Freddie. Being as you’re smart about education, any way you could give a little coverage to Washington state’s charter school battle? Got a well-funded (understatement) pro-charter initiative on the ballot this year. Lopsided fight. To kill this would be one giant step for all teacher/parent/student/rational-citizen kind.
Help.
BryanS
My favorite wacky fact is 11
What the hell is wrong with set theory. Computer Science would pretty much be impossible without it. The only thing we could figure out is that a Venn diagram looks too much like a man’s posterior and it got the Bob Jones guy thinking sinful thoughts.
SqueakyRat
On the KKK achieving “respectability.” That’s not actually wrong. They were very powerful in Indiana in the 20’s, when my grandfather ran for the state legislature. They were just as hideous as they are now, or more so, but they were also “mainstream” at the time. Sad.
RandyH
I read somewhere recently that members of the Louisiana legislature were shocked, horrified to find that the vouchers could also be used at Islamic schools. Doh!
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
Although if you can smash a union or two and get some teachers off of the government dole, small price to pay, amirite?
Which Presidential candidate on the ballot this fall does not favor this?
Last I checked, Obama’s former chief of staff, Mayor Rahmbo, was trying to kick the cat feathers off of Chicago teachers.
And his current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has made his career promoting “charter schools”, aka “privatize the profits, socialize the costs”.
~
Joel
@BGinCHI: Not to mention the casket industry, the funeral home industry and the cemetery industry.
Harry R. Sohl
@BGinCHI:
Hence their new, revisionist term, “Urbaniggers”. (c) 2012
George de Verges
Just a note, but the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles that died on the various Trail of Tears were, overwhelmingly Christian. Baptist, in fact. Just thought I’d mention it.
Richard Stevens
All part of the larger plan to prevent the majority from getting ‘too smart’.
Smart people don’t buy lies easily and that is the problem.
Keep’em stupid so you can convince them that low pay, long hours and no upward mobility is part of ‘God’s Plan’ and that they should accept and live happily in misery.
Meanwhile, the chosen ones, the rich, will inherit the earth.
Sounds like a plan to me and it’s been working for the rich so far.