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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  4564 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Your Tax Dollars Hard at Work
We can agree that the Dept of Ed is a tyrannical organization, and that we would be better served if they were in the business of support for local school districts than in the business of dictating curricula. We actually have W to thank for a lot of that, with the advent of No Child Left Behind, the biggest federal takeover of local schools in US history. BO has certainly done nothing but amp it up.

On the first point, I would argue that teaching about waiting to have sex until marriage is far from a generic moral; it is a religious ideal, and it has no place in most modern people's lives. To call it generic moral is so far from reality, as to be pure fantasy. To me, generic morals are essentially that which infringes on the freedom of others; i.e. don't murder, steal, etc. Anything to do with sex is a personal choice, and personal morality. Its not for any school to be teaching religious norms.





hootsbox  ·  4557 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Or...one could argue, and overwhelmingly I might add, that the opposite is also an infringement on the freedom of others, others that, by the way, are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, that they also, don't get "marginalized" and pushed as an irrelevant "minority", when, in reality, are the majority and made the majority of the citizens in the founding of our nation. One can look at STDs, growth in the crime rate, poverty levels, high school dropout rates, and other like indicators, and see that teaching "generic" morality based on the actual results of NOT following monogamy and abstinence from a statistical point of view (see the Statistical Abstract of the United States).

Also, to say that the modern Western "rule of law" has no basis in religious "ten commandments" or, universally, the "big eight” which are shared by all world religions, is historically incorrect, un-factual, and is not grounded in "correct history" (only in revisionist history of the "progressives" post 1947) which is mostly what is taught in our "institutions of higher learning". Starting with Lord Blackstone, and the Magna Carta, most of the concepts of "freedom" are based in the Judeo/Christian ethic and rule of law! If you say that, for instance, stealing is wrong, but it is not based on the “ten commandment” mandates is to fly in the face of reason.