Archives for category: Religion

Nebraska will have a voucher referendum this fall unless courts keep them off the ballot. Friends of public schools gathered way more than enough signatures to get a state referendum. The top state election official certified that they met the qualifications.

But Republican leaders are desperate to kill the referendum because they know it will pass. NO VOUCHER REFERENDUM HAS EVER PASSED.

Nebraska’s top election official has ruled that voters will get to decide this year whether to repeal a law that gives taxpayer money for private school scholarships.

But both Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen and state Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, who authored the school choice law and sought to have the repeal effort kept off the ballot, acknowledge that the courts will likely ultimately decide if the repeal question makes it onto November’s ballot.

Evnen said in a news release late Thursday that he consulted state law and previous state attorney general opinions before concluding that the referendum question is legal and will appear on the November ballot “unless otherwise ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction.”

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Nebraska, Religion, Republicans, Rural Schools, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Tennessee: Lobbyist Warned Anti-Voucher Republicans of “Public Hangings” if They Don’t Support Vouchers

By dianeravitch

March 5, 2024 //

A secret recording of a lobbyist’s meeting in 2016 showed the true face of the voucher movement in Tennessee and elsewhere.

The lobbyist, an official with Betsy DeVos’s Tennessee Federation for Children, made clear that Republican legislators who opposed vouchers would face harsh retribution. He pledged that anti-voucher Republican legislators would be challenged in a primary by well-funded opponents committed to pass vouchers. Money would come in from out-of-state billionaires and millionaires to knock off Republicans who voted against vouchers.

The story came from NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A secret recording reveals how ultra-wealthy forces have laid the groundwork for the current debate in the Tennessee legislature over school vouchers by using their money to intimidate, even eliminate, those who dared to disagree.

In the recording obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates from a 2016 strategy session, Nashville investment banker Mark Gill discusses targeting certain anti-voucher lawmakers for defeat as a form of “public hangings.” At the time, Gill was a member of the board of directors for the pro-voucher group Tennessee Federation for Children.

Using their vast resources to defeat key incumbents, Gill argues, would send a signal to other lawmakers in the next legislative session…

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has teed up the issue this year with a plan for school vouchers that would send hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools.

It follows a years-long effort by school privatization forces to elect lawmakers who would vote their way and to destroy those who would not.

In the 2016 recording, Mark Gill discusses the prospect of turning against Republican Rep. Eddie Smith from Knoxville because Smith had voted against a bill designed to cripple the ability of teacher groups to have dues deducted from teachers’ paychecks.

Gill has served on the Tennessee Board of Regents overseeing the state’s community and technical colleges since 2019.

“Think about it,” Gill says.

“What better way to say to people, OK, you want us to fall on our sword for you, to spend thousands of dollars — which I did personally — to get you elected, and you come up here and do this sh*t. Let me just show you what the consequences of that are,” Gill says…

At the time, Gill was also considering targeting Republican Judd Matheny from Tullahoma because Matheny was viewed as being too close to Tennessee teachers and would be a good “scalp” to hang on the school privatizers’ efforts.

“He also has, I think, put himself in a position where his scalp could be very valuable to all school reformers,” Gill says, noting Matheny’s relationship with the Tennessee Education Association. “He is one of the people who has bought the TEA line that you need to side with the TEA because of the teachers and that’s your safest route.”

The reporter for NewsChannel 5 played the recording for J.C. Bowman, leader of the Professional Educators of Tennessee.

Bowman was stunned.

“Judd Matheny was a conservative — a big Second Amendment guy. Some of the names they mention in there — conservative all the way through. So you are going to eat your own…”

NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted to Bowman that Gill was not talking about convincing lawmakers that the Tennessee Federation for Children was right on the issue of school vouchers.

“No, they are not even making that comparison,” the teacher lobbyist agreed.

“If you put this issue on the ballot — and that’s what I would say, put it on the ballot — vouchers would lose.”

A March 2022 NewsChannel 5 investigation revealed how the battle over education in Tennessee is largely financed by out-of-state billionaires and millionaires.

Last fall, NewsChannel 5 Investigates obtained a proposal — submitted to a foundation controlled by the billionaire Walton family of Walmart fame — detailing a plan by school privatization forces to spend $3.7 million in 2016 on legislative races in Tennessee.

That same year, The Tennessean reported on an Alabama trip where Gill had hosted five pro-voucher lawmakers for a three-day weekend at his Gulf Shores condo.

“I don’t think anybody is going to get unseated without some substantial independent expenditures coming in there,” Gill says, acknowledging that wealthy special interests would need to spend a lot of money to knock off lawmakers who did not vote their way.

That strategy was apparent in 2022 when Republicans Bob Ramsey and Terri Lynn Weaver were targeted and defeated.

Weaver was among those Republicans who in 2019 refused to bow to pressure to vote for school vouchers.

And like these ads taken out against Bob Ramsey, Weaver also faced attacks from school privatization forces for supposedly being a corrupt career politician — attacks funded by so-called dark money.

“Tremendous amounts of money, much of which is outside money, [the] money was not from my district,” Weaver said. “They slander you. They want to win — and they’ll do anything to do it.”

Bowman said Gill’s strategy represents “the absolute destruction of people.”

We wanted to know, “Is there anyone on the public education side of the debate playing this sort of hardball politics?”

“None that I know of,” Bowman said. “I know of nobody playing that.”

To read the complete article and to listen to the recording, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Tennessee, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Cameron Vickrey: No to Chaplains in School!

By dianeravitch

March 1, 2024 //

Cameron Vickrey is a pastor in Texas who works as communications director for Fellowship Southwest. Her father was a pastor, her husband is a pastor, and she believes in public schools. This idea of adding pastors as mental health counselors is catching on in the South. At the moment, the Florida legislature is discussing the idea, as are other states. It’s one more way to erode the line between church and state. Will schools have pastors for every sect? Imams? Rabbis? What about the students who are atheists? Will they be denied counseling?

Cameron Vickrey wrote against this idea for the San Antonio Express-News

The deadline looms. Every public school district in Texas has been given until March 1 to choose between what seems to be two options for the role of chaplains in their schools.

But many are finding their way forward with a third way. This third way might at first seem like a people-pleasing, nondecision that avoids conflict and ignores the issue, but there’s wisdom in it.

In the regular session of the Texas Legislature last spring, lawmakers made several attempts to incorporate additional religious expression into public schools. Most of those efforts, like posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and instituting a period for prayer and Bible study, failed. But SB 763 became law.

The chaplain bill, as it is known, requires school districts to choose whether they will allow paid or volunteer chaplains to serve students in public schools.

The National School Chaplain Association advocated for this legislation to fill a self-proclaimed need for more counselors in public schools to meet the mental health needs of students.

Not coincidentally, the leader of this association runs another organization, Mission Generation. Mission Generation hopes to have 100 million people in discipleship with Jesus Christ by 2025 by offering school chaplain programs in public schools. So while it’s clearly not a way to meet mental health needs, at least not a safe way, it may very well be a way to turn schools into mission fields.

With all the political rhetoric about public schools being godless or hostile to religion, you might be surprised at how much leeway is given for religious expression.

So, back to our options, which conventionally have been viewed as two: Either, yes, we will allow paid and/or volunteer chaplains to serve as counselors; or, no, we will not. The Legislature is forcing school boards to take sides, inviting further polarization. It sets the stage for activists to enter school districts and accuse board members on either side of the issue of bending to political will.

Under the Constitution, students are free to pray in school. They can wear religious clothing and accessories. They can share their faith with other students. They can read Scripture. Teachers, too, can discuss religion in class from an academic or objective perspective. And religious groups have the right to meet on campus outside of school.

There will be a public record of how each trustee of Texas’s 1,200 districts voted. Which side will they choose? Will they go on record supporting evangelistic efforts in public schools or not? It’s a political pickle.

Enter the third way: Avoid taking sides by passing a resolution affirming a current volunteer policy that doesn’t discriminate against chaplains.

My initial beef with this option is rooted in these districts’ unwillingness to stop the intrusion of religious influence into public schools. But I’m starting to like it. Finding a workaround to the Legislature’s demands is deliciously subversive. By refusing to play their game, these school boards are protecting their districts from political polarization, which is the biggest problem facing public education today.

I heartily commend those school boards that have rejected SB 763, including a majority of those in Bexar County. These districts have made sure the religious liberty of all students will continue to be protected from those who confuse schools with churches.

My kids’ district, North East ISD, has not yet voted. It is in an interesting position since the passing of trustee Terri Williams last fall has resulted in the potential for an evenly split vote. I urge the NEISD school board to protect our students from religious overreach. I believe they will, whether that comes in the form of a complete rejection of SB 763 or the subversive third way.

And if I’m totally surprised and they approve a chaplaincy program, well, that’s what elections are for.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

Heather Cox Richardson: Why the Founders Insisted on Separating Church and State

By dianeravitch

February 28, 2024 //

Heather Cox Richardson put the Alabama court decision declaring embryos to be children into historical context. The Founders did not want the nation to be controlled by theocrats. They understood the importance of separating church and state. That separation was and is important for the protection of the church from the state and for the protection of the state from the church.

She writes:

The Alabama Supreme Court on February 16, 2024, decided that cells awaiting implantation for in vitro fertilization are children and that the accidental destruction of such an embryo falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In an opinion concurring with the ruling, Chief Justice Tom Parker declared that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view of the sanctity of life” and said that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

Payton Armstrong of media watchdog Media Matters for America reported today that on the same day the Alabama decision came down, an interview Parker did on the program of a self-proclaimed “prophet” and Q-Anon conspiracy theorist appeared. In it, Parker claimed that “God created government” and called it “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”

Parker referred to the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theory that appeared in 1975, which claims that Christians must take over the “seven mountains” of U.S. life: religion, family, education, media, entertainment, business…and government. He told his interviewer that “we’ve abandoned those Seven Mountains and they’ve been occupied by the other side.” God “is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains right now,” he said.

While Republicans are split on the decision about embryos after a number of hospitals have ended their popular IVF programs out of fear of prosecution, others, like Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley agreed that “embryos, to me, are babies.”

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) identifies himself as a Christian, has argued that the United States is a Christian nation, and has called for “biblically sanctioned government.” At a retreat of Republican leaders this weekend, as the country is grappling with both the need to support Ukraine and the need to fund the government, he tried to rally the attendees with what some called a “sermon” arguing that the Republican Party needed to save the country from its lack of morality.

As Charles Blow of the New York Times put it: “If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.”

In the United States, theocracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand.

The framers of the Constitution quite deliberately excluded religion from the U.S. Constitution. As a young man, James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had seen his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for undermining the established church in the state. He came to believe that men had a right to the free exercise of religion.

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

In order to make sure men had the right of conscience, the framers added the First Amendment to the Constitution. It read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

Madison was right to link religion and representative government. In the early years of the nation, Americans zealously guarded the wall between the two. They strictly limited the power of the federal government to reflect religion, refusing even to permit the government to stop delivery of the U.S. mails on Sunday out of concern that Jews and Christians did not share the same Sabbath, and the government could not choose one over the other. The Constitution, a congressional report noted, gave Congress no authority “to inquire and determine what part of time, or whether any has been set apart by the Almighty for religious exercises.”

But the Civil War marked a change. As early as the 1830s, southern white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.

A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, “subordinate” to white men by design. “All women live by marriage,” he said. “It is their only duty.” Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. “For my part,” the older man said, “I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.”

The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. As historian Gaines Foster explained in his 2002 book Moral Reconstruction, which explores the nineteenth-century relationship between government and morality, it was the Confederacy, not the U.S. government, that sought to align the state with God. A nation was more than the “aggregation of individuals,” one Presbyterian minister preached, it was “a sort of person before God,” and the government must purge that nation of sins.

Confederates not only invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.”

The United States, in contrast, was recentering democracy during the war, and it rejected the alignment of the federal government with a religious vision. When reformers in the United States tried to change the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the sources of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Ruler among nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union,” the House Committee on the Judiciary concluded that “the Constitution of the United States does not recognize a Supreme Being.”

That defense of democracy—the will of the majority—continued to hold religious extremists at bay.

Reformers continued to try to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution, Foster explains, and in March 1896 once again got so far as the House Committee on the Judiciary. One reformer stressed that turning the Constitution into a Christian document would provide a source of authority for the government that, he implied, it lacked when it simply relied on a voting majority. A religious amendment “asks the Bible to decide moral issues in political life; not all moral questions, but simply those that have become political questions.”

Opponents recognized this attempt as a revolutionary attack that would dissolve the separation of church and state, and hand power to a religious minority. One reformer said that Congress had no right to enact laws that were not in “harmony with the justice of God” and that the voice of the people should prevail only when it was “right.” Congressmen then asked who would decide what was right, and what would happen if the majority was wrong. Would the Supreme Court turn into an interpreter of the Bible?

The committee set the proposal aside.

Now, once again, we are watching a minority trying to impose its will on the majority, with leaders like House speaker Johnson noting that “I try to do every day what my constituents want. But sometimes what your constituents want does not line up with the principles God gave us for government. And you have to have conviction enough to stand [up] to your own people….”

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Freedom, History, Minneapolis, Religion, Separation of church and state

Texas Monthly: The Billionaire Bully Who Wants Texas to be a Theocracy

By dianeravitch

February 28, 2024 //

Texas has several billionaire bullies who want the state to keep their taxes low, cut benefits to needy people, and enact vouchers so that more students can attend religious schools on the public’s dime.

Russell Gold writes in the Texas Monthly about Tim Dunn, a billionaire who has used his money to purge the Republican Party of moderates. In addition to being an oilman, Tim Dunn is a pastor and a devout Christian nationalist. He has funded numerous organizations that act as pass-throughs for his political contributions, such as Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the First Liberty Institute, Empower Texans, Texas Scorecard, Ballotpedia, Stand for Freedom PAC,

Gold writes:

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him. But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

For two decades he has been quietly, methodically, and patiently building a political machine that has pushed Texas forcefully to the right, sending more and more members of the centrist wing of the Republican Party into exile. A 68-year-old oil billionaire, Dunn seeks to transform Texas into something resembling a theocracy. If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook. If you question why Texas’s elected officials no longer represent the majority of Texans’ views, the reason can be traced to the tactics employed by Dunn and the many organizations and politicians he funds and influences. He has built his own caucus within the Legislature that is financially beholden to him. And despite his Sunday school pleas for comity, Dunn has deepened Texas’s political divisions: there are the Democrats and what remains of the mainstream conservative Republican Party. And then there are Dunn and his allies….

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of 2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative, whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control politicians.

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate independently? Their fate is easy to predict.

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the combative and divisive chair of the state GOP…

Dunn’s influence goes well beyond campaigns and politics. His résumé is lengthy. He is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank located a couple of blocks south of the Capitol. TPPF generates policy proposals—from severe property tax cuts to bills that impede the growth of renewable energy—that are often taken up by the Texas Legislature and emulated in other red states. He has served for years on the board of the First Liberty Institute, a legal powerhouse that has won Supreme Court cases to advance Christianity’s role in public life. ..

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn that then became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes.

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network has attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts. Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute, publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an “ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a quarter billion page views in 2022…

Dunn has a few key powerful officials in his pocket, including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (a job considered more powerful than the governor) and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who escaped an effort to impeach him thanks to Dunn’s largesse.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans.

Back in 2010, Dunn met with Joe Strauss, the Republican Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Strauss represented San Antonio. He is Jewish. Dunn told Strauss that only Christians should be in leadership roles.

Considering that Jesus was Jewish, that’s not a very Christ-like sentiment. Unless you are a Christian nationalist.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Religion, Texas, Vouchers

Paul Bowers: Reconciling/Resisting Christian Faith and Christian Haters

By dianeravitch

February 25, 2024 //

Paul Bowers used to be the education reporter for the Charleston News & Courier. I contacted him when I was trying to understand some issues that he wrote about. Paul left his newspaper job (I think someone in the local power elite complained about his honest reporting on the privatizers). After he left, he started a blog called Brutal South. Now he works as communications director for the South Carolina ACLU. As you can imagine, he’s always busy, always pushing back against book bans, attacks on voting rights, and more.

In this post, he wrestles with his Christian faith. He’s covered so many Christian faith leaders who espouse hateful views that he has had to question his own views. He feels sure that the Jesus he believes in would not agree with them.

I urge you to read the post. I’m quoting just the beginning and the ending.

He writes:

On weekday mornings the coffee shop is clustered with pods of the men. The men are holding forth — loudly — about the virtues of intermittent fasting, the meaning of the Egyptian plagues, and the Bible’s clear teaching on matters of human sexuality.

I used to be part of the pods, but now I sit alone. I eavesdrop. Some days when I listen to them reading from their Bible commentaries I hear an encouraging word, and I miss the feeling of spiritual fellowship. Most days I hear nonsense and remember why I’m in no hurry to return to church.

Last year the great Mississippi songwriter Andrew Bryant released one of my favorite albums, Prodigal, building on the theme that he’s “like the prodigal who never left at all.” He still lives in Mississippi; I still live in South Carolina. When he sings about living on the far side of the creek from the faith community that raised him, I understand him to mean it’s a walkable distance, a permeable barrier. I find myself similarly situated.

I’ve left two churches in my adult life, a theologically conservative one by choice and a theologically progressive one because its leaders left and the congregation ceased meeting. I still see people from both churches often. My family and I never intend to leave our town, so this will likely be the case for the rest of our lives….

I don’t have Christian fellowship anymore, but I do have solidarity. They’re not the same thing.

It would be fair for you to ask if I still believe in God at all. I do, though I would no longer try to convince you one way or the other. I find myself in the position the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan described once: “My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell … It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.”

I do love Jesus, and I love the people I know who follow him. Lately I’ve seen Christians with the ash of mortification on their foreheads giving benedictions to the frightened families of trans kids; pledging to fight our Christian governor’s labor union-bashing tactics to the gates of hell; and speaking out against the death penalty — our modern crucifixion — even for people who murdered their family members.

Nietzsche called the way of Jesus “slave morality” and he wasn’t completely wrong, but I think he misread the faith of enslaved people. If the gospel narrative is true then I want to be on the side of Jesus and not the Roman empire, of Moses and not Pharaoh, of Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee. I want to walk justly and love my enemies and fight for liberation always. I’m with the crucified people, as Ignacio Ellacuría put it. There are nonreligious people following this path just as well as the faithful, but for better or worse I will always have a religious impulse in me. A part of me will always seek the Spirit even if it never comes.

This coming Friday I’ll speak at an event hosted by faith leaders in Greenville, focused on how we can carry out the sacred work of hospitality by fighting for housing justice. We pursue this work in the heart of so-called Trump Country, in the shadow of the Moral Majority, amid the ferment of white Christian nationalism and even Christian fascism. We walk as believers, against other believers, ostensibly praying to the same god.

Categories Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Religion, South Carolina

Alexandra Petri: Congratulations! That Cluster of Cells is a child!

By dianeravitch

February 23, 2024 //

Alexandra Petri is a humorist for The Washington Post. She wrote today about the crazy decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that a frozen embryo (a fertilized egg) is a child. Destroying the frozen embryo is murder.

She begins:

Having kids is nothing like they tell you it will be! How tiny they are, and how you can hardly see them without a microscope. How you can’t hold them, not even once. How they don’t have anything that could be regarded, even optimistically, as a laugh, or a face. Isn’t being a parent the best? Isn’t it laughably cruel that the Alabama Supreme Court says that this is already a child? That this cluster of hopeful cells that you have been dreaming could become a baby is actually a person already? You would be laughing, if you could stop crying.

What an appallingly cruel thing to say to people already going through so much to have a child, people who were prepared to endure the grueling in vitro fertilization process of treatments and injections and embryo development before their pregnancy could even begin. What a ridiculous thing to say to anyone with a modicum of sense.

Don’t believe the evidence of your senses. Embryos are children. Flour is cake. These acorns are an old-growth forest. This half-baked insulting nonsense of a ruling is justice.

You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary. You don’t need to feed them, ever. They don’t need books. They don’t need clean water or fresh air or sunshine — in fact, they couldn’t survive a minute outside the glass dish.

How did the Alabama judges know? God told them.

Trump came out against the Alabama decision, and most Republicans are rapidly backtracking. They say they want motmre children to be born, and IVF is good. Now that Trump has given his blessing to IVF, watch the Republicans pivot. only poor Nikki Haley is left out in the cold, because her snap reaction was to praise the decision.

Categories Alabama, Childhood, Humor, Religion, Science

Christian Nationalists Plan to Infuse Their Ideas in a Second Trump Term

By dianeravitch

February 23, 2024 //

Christian Nationalists are already preparing for their roles in a second Trump administration. It is ironic that the religious zealots cluster around one of the most non religious figures in American life. I recall an anecdote from the book by Trump’s “fixer”Michael Cohen, when a group of evangelical Christians meets with Trump and lay their hands on him, all together. When the earnest group leaves, Trump laughs with Cohen. They both know that he’s a master con man, and he conned them.

Politico writes:

An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.

Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.

One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.

CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.

The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”

Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.

Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump

Nebraska: Public School Supporters Fight Vouchers with Ballot Referendum

By dianeravitch

February 19, 2024 //

In the Public Interest is an excellent source of information about privatization in every sphere of life, wherever privatizers see a chance to turn a public service into private profit. Its latest post is about the citizens’ fight to overturn a new voucher plan in Nebraska.

Open the link to see the cost of vouchers in Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio. Count on costs to go up every year, as legislators expand eligibility and raise income limits.

In early 2023, the Nebraska legislature passed LB753, which created a new private school tax-credit voucher program. The bill allows a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to individuals and corporations that donate to a scholarship granting organization (SGO), which would issue the vouchers to families to pay for private school. Eligibility requirements are broad, allowing, for example, any child entering either kindergarten or 9th grade at a private school, or any student who has spent at least one semester in a public school to apply for a voucher. The bill would divert up to $25 million annually from the state, but that figure could go up to $100 million.

The bill includes a standard “hands off clause,” which prevents the state from exercising any authority over the school and how it operates. It’s basically a license to discriminate.

Shortly after the bill was passed, public school supporters launched a referendum petition drive to put repeal of the new law on the November 2024 ballot. In fewer than 90 days, the repeal campaign gathered nearly double the number of required signatures from across the state. The effort was led by Support Our Schools Nebraska, a coalition that includes, among others, the Nebraska State Education Association, OpenSky Policy Institute, Parent-Teacher Association of Nebraska, Stand for Schools, League of Women Voters of Nebraska, Omaha NAACP, ARC of Nebraska, Nebraska Farmers Union, and the Nebraska Civic Engagement Table.

In Nebraska, 84% of private schools are religiously affiliated. Many, if not most of these schools are legally permitted to discriminate against applicants based on their gender orientation, religious affiliation, or other characteristics. The Nebraska OpenSky Policy Institute has estimated that state aid distributed to public schools could decrease by almost $12 million in response to the new voucher program.

Forces aligned against the repeal include the usual suspects, like the American Federation for Children, founded by anti-public-education zealot Betsy DeVos, which donated $583,000 along with $103,000 of in-kind services to the pro-voucher effort, on top of money DeVos spent to influence Nebraska state senate races in the last cycle. The Nebraska Catholic Conference, whose coffers stand to gain from LB753, has also thrown its weight and reach behind the anti-public education side. Jeremy Ekeler left his job as associate director of education policy at the Conference in November to become the executive director of Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska, a state-approved scholarship granting organization helping to implement LB753. They’re not only working to defeat the ballot measure, they’re trying to keep it off the ballot entirely, following a playbook the right has used to subvert a variety of citizen-led, petition-driven initiatives around the country.

As we have pointed out before and as the chart above illustrates, vouchers bleed public school districts of needed funds, allow for discrimination, lower educational standards (by not necessarily having many), and lead to resegregation.

As if that weren’t enough, they turn out to be budget busters for states.

In the Public Interest will keep an eye on this fight because it may be the clearest indication that, while conservative politicians have thrown their support to various schemes that divert public funds from public schools, the public opposes these efforts and will show up at the polls to make their feelings felt.