California Fundamentalists Homeschool the Next Generation of Intolerance

The fundies in California are pissed off.  They’re so pissed off that they’re urging conservative Christian parents to take their children out of the public school system and into home schooling where they will supposedly receive a better education while being indoctrinated with the “right” moral values.

The source of all of this uproar?  SB-777 - Student Civil Rights Act, a bill that aims to extend basic civil rights protection to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transexual students in the California school system.  That’s all.  They’re just explicitly spelling out that people in the GLBT community have the same basic human rights and protections as everyone else in the public school system.

These Christian groups are against civil rights.  Sit there for a moment and let that sink in.  Evidently the discrimination problem against the GLBT community was bad enough in California schools that it was necessary to sponsor a bill to clear up this point, and the fundamentalists are outraged.  Imagine a group coming out and publicly stating that they were against providing equal protection of civil rights for African Americans or Jews because their invisible friend told them that it was wicked.  But because this is discrimination based on sexual orientation it’s somehow okay based on religious grounds.

The irony of ironies is that these groups are claiming that the California government is being intolerant of their beliefs by preaching tolerance in the schools.  Pot, meet kettle.

The scare-mongering that they’re engaging in would be laughable if it wasn’t so mind-bogglingly depressing that there are people out there who actually think like this:

This group called upon families to remove their children from the California public schools in the wake of that state’s passage of laws which mandate the sexual indoctrination of young children in pro-homosexual lifestyles.

In this case, the “pro-homosexual lifestyle” that these Christian groups are referring to is the old deep and abiding fear that the gays are trying to take over the education system and turn all of the God-fearing Christian gay.  What the bill actually does is make sure that the God-fearing Christians will get in trouble for physically and mentally abusing kids in the system who are gay.  It’s less a “pro-homosexual lifestyle” bill and more a “homosexual lifestyle positive” bill. 

Leave it to a group of fundamentalists to throw a temper tantrum about having their basic rights violated by a law that prevents them from violating the basic rights of other people.

So what does this all mean?

All of the educational alternatives that were presented by the group would permit families to train their children in a manner that is consistent with biblical ethics.

Oh!  I see what you did there.  These children will be taken out of the public schools where they’re taught a live and let live worldview, and will instead be teaching them a system of ethics and morality that’s based on a book that advocates, among other things, murder, genocide, intolerance, having sex with your parents, having your father’s children, killing non-believers, killing women who have pre-marital sex (but not the men), sending women into the desert for a week and making animal sacrifices to appease God when they’re menstruating, killing homosexuals, sending children into exile if they see their parents naked, and did I mention all the genocide?

 Do you really want to be around a person who was schooled in a fucked up values system like that?  I didn’t think so.  They claim that the education system is fundamentally flawed, and I would have to agree with them on that point.  Any system that allows parents to pull their children out of the public school system so that they can be indoctrinated in intolerance is a flawed system indeed.

Technorati Tags: SB 777, California Student Civil Rights Act, California education, christians, christian fundamentalists, crazy fundamentalists, Christian intolerance, religious intolerance, Christian hypocrisy