[Raises hand.]
Update: Duncan Public Schools has released a statement saying their employees will not be distributing Bibles, or any other religious materials, to students while on the job.
Cool. So they can just hand them out to students after school when they are off the job. Everybody wins. Everybody’s happy.
Yep-adults going up to children without their parent’s prior permission and handing them unsolicited material. Nothing wrong with that.
Knew it! Go Church of Ahriman, Go!
The funny thing is that the average parent who has no problem with this would have a shitfit if it were a Koran or the Vedas or the Satanic Bible.
No, not everyone’s happy. This shouldn’t ever have come up today. It beggars the imagination to believe that a teacher in the US today does not know about SOCAS. The proper reaction, regardless of the predominant faith in the area or the prevailing attitude of the students’ parents, is to can the offending teacher for proselytizing on school property, during school time, to students. This is not a minor error of judgment; it was intentional and with disregard to legality/constitutionality.
This is Oklahoma, the state that Constitutionally banned Sharia Law. The South is a different place. Jesus Saves billboards every 10 feet, crosses on the walls of every ma and pa shop, ‘God Save America’ bumper stickers outnumber ‘Coexist’ 100:1
Proselytizing shouldn’t be allowed, but I don’t see it as egregious as you do, especially when Jesus is everywhere down there. Let a teacher pull this stupid shit for an afternoon, it predictably gets national coverage, Satanists start handing out pamphlets and everyone learns their lesson about the value of the separation of church and state.
I grew up in the South and am rather well acquainted with its bullshit…er, acceptance of a certain attitude towards a certain religious persuasion.
I see it as egregious because it is. And there’s no way the teacher concerned does not know that it is. Of course the teacher, the school, the school board (elected from the community of course), and the community don’t care unless:
And then the shit hits the fan. But nobody learns about SOCAS then. What they learn is more bullshit. To wit: “This is a Christian country” and “Those people need to go back where they come from” or “If you aren’t like us good Christians* then you can leave”.
Yeah. The South. A million things to love about it and a million things to hate about it; just like anywhere else on the planet. But there’s one very important thing that makes the South stand out from the rest of the pack: every one of the million things to hate about it is on a far, far greater scale than the things to like about it.
*Gee. I wonder which denominations of Christianity don’t cut it as Christian for those folks. I already know mine doesn’t.
Speaking of bullshit in the South:
More at the link.
And this bit from the sponsor of the bill is pretty telling:
A million and one.
I can’t get too worked up about this. What’s the concern, that some kid might read a bible? And then what? And some kids felt “peer-pressure” to take the bible. Big deal, go home and throw it in the trash or donate it to Goodwill. Proselytizing at this level is pretty harmless.
On my final day at primary school (age 11) we were all given one children’s illustrated bible, a recorder, and a French dictionary as leaving presents. This was a UK state run school. Well, I say everyone, everyone in my year; there were two Jehovah’s witness kids in the year above, who were the only kids in the tiny school that were neither mainstream Christian nor nonreligious, and I don’t remember if the Jehovah’s witness kids got a different book instead. I suspect so.
I was atheist at the time, but still on the system as Christian; the question was in the annual checklist they sent out to confirm stuff like address and contact details, but my mother always ticked Church of England until she decided I was I old enough to just fill the form out myself. I don’t know why she ticked that, she’s never been religious, and I’m not christened.
I think I still have the French dictionary and recorder somewhere, I can’t remember what happened to the bible. The pictures weren’t very good.
That sounds like they were just doing the other version of separation, where you include all the religions. That’s actually the type I’ve lobbied for in the U.S. when dealing with schools.
The point is, there is no implication that Christianity is the official school religion.
I’ve always thought it funny that the UK, which does have an official religion, tends to get things right about stuff like this.
Not so much- I mean, at primary school we did a nativity show in the local church (which dated back to before the 1200s in part, and was pretty awesome, but I digress), and the local vicar came and did an assembly with us once a month or so, with a singalong. I do recall him singing “Puff The Magic Dragon” once though, so the Christian emphasis wasn’t that serious, byt still… Other religions were mentioned, but not really taken seriously.
Secondary school was a lot more inclusive, and the only religious stuff was comparative religion.
No, the concern is not about “some kid reading a bible”. It’s about a government-backed authority figure–one with substantial direct power over the kids–pushing a religion at them. It’s misuse of governmental authority to proselytize.
This particular incident in isolation might be mostly harmless–more “I guess I’d better take one or the teacher will mess with my grades” than “the teacher knows everything and says this is Right”. The larger problem is that it’s part of a pattern–a pattern of school (and thereby governmental) endorsement of a particular religion. There are other teachers trying to hand out bibles, prayers at sports events, preachers invited to officiate (i.e. sermonize) at school ceremonies. It’s not even the direct proselytization so much as the attempt to establish a setting in which Christianity is the norm and everything else is “weird”. It preys on the impulse to fit in and subtly (or not-so-subtly) works against those who don’t.
Give them a Koran, or “Why I Am Not a Christian” and you’ll see how harmless they find it. Hell, they’d probably have a fit if the teacher handed out Harry Potter. Or “Heather has Two Mommies.”
These jerks object to science being taught in the the classroom if the knuckle-dragging parents are ignorant creationists. (And I repeat myself.) But handing out Bibles to kids whose parents might have other or no faiths is just fine.
No matter. Oklahoma is going to collapse thanks to the earthquakes their energy companies are creating. Do you know they have three times more earthquakes than California?
I have heard those fist communions are quite painful.