President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

More fun with anecdotes: I taught at a Catholic high school for five years within the last decade in a Catholic minority region. We had a fair share of non-Catholics. There was no opting out of schoolwide masses, daily prayer or the required religion class. There also were no philosophy or comparative religion classes. Science was played straight, but Catholics are more open-minded about theories like evolution than analogous evangelical schools, which were more common in that area.

 

Uh yes I did.

I was specifically admonished in 1968, when I was 10 years old in fourth grade, not to say so many nasty things about Richard Nixon in school, because some parents were getting upset. (Even though in '68 most Catholics were heavily anti-Nixon -- the JFK carryover effect.)

 

In my Catholic grade school in the 60s/70s, several parents in my class were faculty members of the in-town university, including the chairman of the chemistry department. We scienced the shit out of everything.

If anybody had gotten up and suggested the teaching of creationism, they would have been laughed out of the building.

 

It should always be easy to avoid calling people names, especially that hit close to home. We should be above that and able to have some sort of a civil conversation here we are, after all, allegedly adults

 

... 10-year-olds really shouldn't be saying "cock slobber" and "fuck stick"?

 

Tea party muckity muck wants a Georgia state senator to resign his committee chairmanship because he didn't keep his wife in line enough to prevent her from marching in Augusta yesterday. Authoritarianism is a helluva drug.

GOP state senator criticized for allowing wife to march | Political Insider blog

 

That's a great story, but it completely ignores the fact that the more prominent places where school vouchers were sought in the 1990's were Cleveland and Milwaukee, where black families who weren't Catholic wanted to go to parochial schools.

 

Hadn't crossed those bridges yet.

 

They're all going to get confirmed.

 

Well, I was well out of the whole school-financing loop by then so it was pretty much off my radar screens.

In my state parochiaid had taken such a blasting at the ballot box in 69-70 that nobody bothered to try it again for 30 years or so, until the charter school mania got going in the late 90s or so.

And some of it had to do with the fact that when non-Catholic private schools, (many of them run by the same people who helped tank parochiaid decades earlier when it mainly would have benefited Catholic schools) came banging for tax money, the response of a lot of Catholics was (and is), "suck it up buttercup, we had to pay every
nickel for our church schools, so now you get to pay your own way too."

 

Dad didn't put you on the education beat in '70?

 

It isn't a matter of upsetting me. It is a matter of me understanding that it violates an important American ideal, the separation of church and state, by using public money to fund religion. Also, it will further weaken public education. I'm not pushing the conspiracy theory that this is all about funneling public money to line the pockets of private investors in private schools (though I'm not completely dismissing that theory).

I am saying that we shouldn't be weakening our public schools further so little Mary and Joseph can learn things in school that they should be learning in their favored house of worship or at home.