Until recently, we imagined that not allowing schoolteachers to molest children would be something everyone -- left, right, conservative, liberal -- would wholeheartedly agree upon. Then we heard of Vic Eliason.
See, it turns out that it all depends what you mean by "molestation." According to Eliason, an evangelical clergyman and founder of a popular Christian radio station in Milwaukee, there's physical molestation and mental molestation. The mental part comes when any public school teacher dares to teach anything other than strict Christian ideology -- like, say, that it just might be possible that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. The physical part is what Jerry Sandusky did. And, according to Eliason, the first is just as evil as the second.
After we finally stopped throwing up, we gave Eliason's words a bit of thought. You know, using that definition, molestation suddenly doesn't sound so bad! We're terribly grateful to all the public school teachers who are sick enough to molest us with concrete facts and globally accepted science. Thanks, guys!
Last week, Eliason chatted on his radio show with Colin Gunn, a home-school advocate and maker of a film called "IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America." (Check out the awesome trailer here.) Gunn and his family travel the country (in an old school bus, of all things) equating public education to joining the Hitler Youth. "We really can't fix any political issue until we fix the public school system," says Gunn, "controlling the future of America by controlling the hearts and minds of all the children that are sent there."
So Gunn wants to control the hearts and minds of all our children... What was that again about Hitler Youth and molestation?
If you happen to be as paranoid and crazy as Gunn and Eliason, never fear! They have a solution to all of this: home-school your children! That way you can avoid all the nasty, inconvenient, science-y things that might contradict your Bible. It might not prepare your kid for a competitive college but -- if Mitt Romney gets his way and guts all those Pell grants -- your kids probably won't be able to afford college anyway!
Now, we have nothing against home schooling; public school isn't right for everyone. But just as we were wondering how all that homeschooling might work out for kids of Christian conservatives, we came across
:
a letter to the editor
of the New Zealand paper
Northern Outlook
. The letter was written by
a 14-year-old self-identified home-schooled girl.
We'll do our best to summarize, but, really,
you should just read the letter
, in which the girl (identified as "Jasmin") worries that, if homosexuality spreads,
ducks will take over the world.
"I don't want my children to have to compete with ducks," she writes, referring, we hope, to children that she imagines she will have someday and not to any actual kids of her own.
We were feeling bad for poor Jasmin - whose letter is contradictory, illogical and preposterously misinformed - until we realized there's a market for contradictory, illogical and preposterously misinformed ideas in the form of the Mitt Romney Campaign!
After all, Mitt Romney changes his position every day, and we still have weeks to go before the election. Maybe it's time for Mitt to steal some solutions from Christian conservative home-schoolers here in the U.S. So take our survey and let's figure this out!
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