Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Sabine Parish, Louisiana Public Schools Basically A Torturous, Fundamentalist Christian Re-Education Camp, Says ACLU

Sabine Parish, Louisiana sounds like a hellhole. Especially it's schools.
The picture of Jesus in the Sabine, Louisiana
PUBLIC school is a nice touch, isn't it?  

I say this assuming that a recent ACLU lawsuit is even 10 percent accurate.

Basically the school district, its teachers and students are mentally torturing a Buddhist middle schooler because he is not a fundamentalist Christian like everybody else there seems to be, according to the lawsuit

Writing in an ACLU blog, Scott Lane discusses the lowlights his Buddhist stepson has been experiencing in Sabine Parish, which appears to put new meaning into the terms "ignorant" and "insular"

Here's some of what Lane says:

"On a science test, their teacher had included a fill-in-the-blank question: 'ISN'T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'

When my stepson didn't know the answer ('Lord'), she belittled him in front of the entire class. When he wrote in 'Lord Buddha' on another exam, she marked it wrong.

As she was returning that exam to stuents, one student proclaimed aloud that 'people are stupid if they think God is not real.'  In response, my stepson's teacher agreed, telling the class: 'Yes! That is right! I had a student miss that on his test' The entire class broke out in laughter at my stepson."

First, let's just stop here and ponder the ALLCAPS and the zillions of exclamation points the teacher put on the test question. There's your red flag right there, never mind all this God stuff.

Secondly, are you being a good Christian if you pick on middle school boys because they don't exactly share your beliefs? Like I said, this sounds like a pretty hellish school, oddly enough, with all the talk about heaven and Jesus that seem to go on there.

OK, Scott Lane, go on with your story of Negreet High School in Sabine Parish, please:

"The same teacher also told our children that the Bible is '100 percent true', that the Earth was created by God 6,000 years ago, and that evolution is 'impossible' and a 'stupid theory made up by stupid people who don't want to believe in God.' She's also told the class that Buddhism is 'stupid.'

Wow! A lot of things are stupid in the bleakly dim mind of this Sabine Parish teacher. Yes, yes, I know the real stupid item here is the teacher, but what the hell.

OK Scott Lane, the teacher was just a weird anomaly right? I'm sure you went to the superintendent and got everything straightened out, right?
The ACLU is suing a Louisiana school district
because they said they don't believe children
should be indoctrinated in fundamentalist
Christian doctrine if they don't want it.  

Well, no. Lane writes:

"She was dismissive and told us that we live in the 'Bible Belt' and that this is just how things are. She added that, because she was not offended by the fact that 'the lady who cuts (her) toenails has a statue of Buddha' we should not be upset by the blatant proselytizing at Negreet or the bullying and harassment of our son and the degradation of his Buddhist faith."

Is it requirement to be excessively ignorant and stupid to work in Sabine Parish schools? This is reading like a bad TV sitcom.  On the bright side, I'm glad we don't know more about the toenail cutter's Buddha in the text of the ACLU lawsuit.

Lane said he tried to point out that the "Bible Belt" is not a separate country (at least not yet!) and the family was still entitled to religious liberty as guaranteed by the Constitution.

The superintendent suggested the kid change his faith or go to another school that, as she allegedly put it "has more Asians"

Yeah, go to that heathen school with those "different," i.e. non-white people!

Lane did take up the superintendent's suggestion that the kid go to that other school, the one tainted by those awful Asians, but the middle schooler got the You Must Turn Christian abuse there, too.

Back at the original school, Lane's kid also had to walk passed all these pictures of Jesus, prayers, and all the fixins' at a real old time religious school. But remember, this was supposed to be a public school.

Lane says he's fine with people who hold deep Christian beliefs. And he's fine with people talking about those religious beliefs.  It's just that a public school should let his Buddhist kid of Thai descent have his religious beliefs too.

Oh, and maybe teach science in science class instead of some perversion of religion. That would be nice, too.

According to the ACLU lawsuit against the Sabine school district, science teacher Rita Roark is said to have skipped the entire textbook section on evolution, saying, "If evolution was real, it would still be happening. Apes would be turning into humans today."

Riiight....Or quote, unquote science teachers would be turning into something much more ignorant than apes.

The school district, responding to the ACLU lawsuit, says it respects the right of anyone to express their religious beliefs.

We'll see where that goes, especially if the suit comes to trial, and/or the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Education Department gets involved, which might happen.

Again, if the ACLU lawsuit has any accuracy, it's amazing that in this day in age public school kids are being taught this crap.

We need every smart kid out there to keep America competitive in this world, and some twisted religious nuts insist on not letting that happen.

Cripes, God gave us the brains to learn, to question, to discover, to get smarter. Somehow I doubt we'd have all that if God didn't want us to find out about the world around us.

So let's get out of the way and let the kids learn instead of imposing some closed minded dogma on them.

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