Well, I'm home sick today, my evil little students have decided to bombard me with their germs and I now have an upper respiratory infection for the ages. Apparently I decided that sitting around coughing up rainbow colored phlegm and groaning wasn't making me miserable enough so I decided to dive into the hot mess that is the national news.
Don't get me wrong, I read the news every day. How else do you think I stay so angry all of the time? But I usually don't have time to do any digging of my own for the stories or try to get a feel as to the opinion of John Q. Dumbass out there. Well today I have time in spades so I decided to surf around and just see where the waves took me (see what I did there with the metaphor? It took almost all my willpower not to stick my head in the oven after writing it...). I knew how it would end, it always goes the same way when I start surfing. I check out some news stories, I read what some bloggers are saying about it. Then I check out things they're referencing to see if it's true or if they're idiots manipulating quotes to show what they want. Eventually I come across something so mind-numbingly thick that I have to walk away from the computer for a few seconds so I can walk around and make sure I haven't been catapaulted into a parallel dimension where logic doesn't exist. Today that something was Wallbuilders....
Now, before I return to my rant let me give some backstory. Once upon a time in the bible belt I was teaching social studies in a ultra conservative school. As anyone who knows me may imagine this was like walking on razorblades, and then salt, and then getting kicked in the nuts by a... nut kicking machine designed to do that flick the toe up thing just perfect so that it hurts more and you get sick to the stomach. However, I tried to make the best of it, acting as a centrist voice of reason in a far right filled area. I took no strong stances on any political beliefs(I feel that a teacher never should unless it is fact, i.e. evolution should be taught in science class as it is considered scientific fact, or that global warming DOES exist[but may be less under our control]). However, during the McCain Obama election I thought I'd go out of the standard curriculum between two units and teach the students about the election process and the candidates, nothing crazy there lots of social studies teachers do it. However, it turned out to be all kinds of crazy. I had set up a mock debate where children drew from a hat either McCain or Obama and regardless of your won leanings you were to support that candidate. Half of my students who drew the Obama card seemed okay if discouraged but the next day I began recieving a few complaints. I even had one child's parent demand that her child be switched to the McCain debate team as she didn't want her child reading about Obama. Furthermore, her letter went on to criticize me for teaching about him at all and to paraphrase I was teaching it because I was either dumb or evil.She attatched in her message a printoff from Wallbuilders that described Obama's platform in a way that made him sound, to me, like he was going to be performing back ally abortions on minors while recording gay porn to be shown in classrooms all the while smoking a blunt rolled from the original constitution and stomping on a bible. No wonder she was scared. At the time I dismissed wallbuilders as I was busy doing important things in my spare time like napping and watching paint dry.
Now segue back to present day and I'm on Wallbuilders with the sneaking suspicion that I've heard it before. I've already read an article that claims that Jeffreson wouldn't have wanted to keep prayer out of public schools and was halfway through an article about how terrible historical revisionism is (unless it's being revised they way you like) when I realized that this is the same site I from the aforementioned story. I took a look at the site and it passed all my credible site tests I did some google searches about it and realized that it is a legitimate site with regular viewers. Then I took a -20 hit on my Faith in Humanity score which was already dangerously low... I understnad being religious, I understand wanting to practice your religion, I still thin it's stupid but I realize why you do it. That's not what got me, it's that the site, which seems to be popular with at least a large niche, is trying to rewrite history and state that the first amendment was only intended to protect Christianity and maybe a handful of other religions. That it's okay to force Christianity on people so long as the government doesn't come out and say that it is an actual official religion... and to reiterate on the site I was reading articles about how revisionism is a BAD thing.
As an aside this further reinforced my opinion that members of the religious right are so arrogant in their beliefs that they can say without choking on their own hypocrisy that you don't have to right to preach about your beliefs in public while deriding you for being unchristian. This is because, so far as I can tell, they are so sure that they are RIGHT that they don't see it as preaching their beliefs but as enlightening you to undeniable facts...
... Meh... I need a cough drop, I'm done here... damn kinds and their germs...
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