JABbering Stooge

Over at JJ’s place, I casually mentioned that I was involved in a book-banning row in high school in the comments section of her post on an effort to ban Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a Toronto-area school. Naturally, JJ wanted to hear the dirt on my experience:

What happened? Details! I’ve never met anyone who’s actually attended a school where books were banned (or burned).

Your Majesty, the pain you tell me to revive is not something that can easily be spoken of — how the Christian Coalition overthrew the wealth of Round Rock ISD and its school board for which we mourn, and things which I personally saw to my cost and of which I was a minor part. Who in telling such a tale even if one of the Alliance Defense Fund or the American Center for Law and Justice or a soldier of steel-hearted Bill Donohue could keep himself from tears? Besides, the night’s dew is already falling from the sky, and the setting stars urge sleep. But if such is your passion to learn of our misfortunes, and hear briefly of the final agony of Westwood High School, although my mind shudders at the memory, and shies away from the grief, I shall begin.*

My memory’s a bit hazy since this took place about 15 years ago (~1994). That spring (while I was still in 8th Grade), a bunch of Christian Coalition-sponsored candidates got voted onto the school board in one of those stealth electoral candidacies that Ralph “Friend of Abramoff” Reed pioneered. As soon as the list of books us incoming freshmen were required to read for class was released, a parent complained (perhaps because he/she realized he/she had a friendly board to work with), and we were off to the book-burning races. The whole thing culminated in the one public hearing in late September/early October that they consented to (in order to preserve the pretense of democracy), where the vast majority of public opinion (which included several well-spoken students) was solidly against any modern-day reenactment of the Bonfire of the Vanities. Realizing the backlash they had created by their actions, the board quietly dropped the matter, but the damage was done. They were promptly voted out in the next school board election.

During the whole row, one of the local papers frequently editorialized in favor the book banning, which prompted my mother to send a fiery letter-to-the-editor suggesting that if the slightest presence of T3h Sexx0rz in a work is grounds for banning, then we ought to ban the Bible. (The ostensible objection to most of the works — Bless Me, Ultima was on the chopping block for different reasons — was the presence of sexual content. However, the fact that most of the books up for banning were by ethnic minorities made my parents darkly suspicious of what the real reason for the crusade was.) You can just imagine the shitstorm that stirred up. Dad was (only half-jokingly) worried about someone firebombing the house. Naturally, when the school board was voted out, the nakedly biased headline in the above newspaper read “West-side vote swings election.” Ugh.

There are three codas to this story — two of the “Take THAT!” variety, and one ironic.

Take THAT™ Coda #1: Dad frequently says that the 1994 Round Rock ISD Bonfire of the Vanities inspired him to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Bless Me, Ultima, and he enjoyed the hell out of them.

Take THAT™ Coda#2: That spring, after the wingnut school board had been voted out, our school was “treated” to a mandatory abstinence-only assembly in the gym. I don’t remember the exact content of the program, but I guess that it was a sort of precursor to True Love Waits… I didn’t put two and two together at the time, but looking back on it, I suspect that this was the outgoing board’s “Fuck you!” to the voters who had unceremoniously kicked them to the curb in the recent school board election. (“Recent” being early 1995.) These days, I tend to count it as one of the three major things that turned me off of organized religion.

Ironic Coda: One of the students (who was a senior at the time) who had spoken so eloquently against the book challenges revealed herself as a fetus fetishist in an op-ed in the last issue of the school newspaper that year.

* With apologies to the Roman poet Virgil.

Shorter Rich Galen: “If Ayn Rand were still alive today, she’d award Rick Santelli with the Meritorious Order of John Galt for his full-throated rant against the lucky duckies who became collateral damage in Big Shitpile™!”

Shorter Burt Prelutsky: “Maybe if Hollyweird hadn’t made so many movies depicting college professors as deranged whackjobs I wouldn’t be sitting here calling college professors deranged whackjobs.”

Shorter Carol Platt Liebau: “No thanks to that loose-lipped (and I mean that in both senses of the word) slut, Bristol Palin, I am forced to admit that I may have been a little too enthusiastic in my support of her mother.”

Shorter Harry R. Jackson, Jr.: “As a (token) black conservative, I am decidedly underwhelmed by Attorney General Eric Holder’s speaking ability.”

Shorter Mike S. Adams: “To my Muslim colleagues, I would like to apologize if you were offended by my accidental revelation of my racism. To my racist librul critics (who are racist), let me borrow a page from the New York Post and say ‘Fuck you! I’m not racist, you are!’ Fuckin’ racists.”

Shorter Salena Zito: “Is it just me, or is President Obama just like Nixon?”

Shorter Doug Giles: “See? Wha’d I tell ya? The Muzzammil Hassan case proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that all Muslims are incurably violent reprobates worthy only of death by microwave! It’s like that story of the scorpion and the crocoduck, or whatever…”

Shorter Phil Harris: “Durr! H’yuck! H’yuck! Libruls is stoopitz! Hur hur hur!”

“Shorter” concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard and given a beneficial mutation by the fine folks at Sadly, No!
I am aware of all Internet tradtions.™

* The Japanese reads Hyaku-nijuu byou Taunhooru — “120-second Townhall.”

Persecuting non-Christians is one of the perks. Don’t expect the Free Speech Warriors™®© of the right to take a stand in Mr. Mullens’ defense any time soon.

For the past few days I have been in contact with Mr. Richard Mullens a school teacher in Brookeland, TX. Brookeland, TX is an incredibly “conservative” area of Texas, and only 16 miles up the road from Jasper, TX, the scene of several incidents of racial violence and murder. Mullens has been the victim of a smear campaign and a slew of unethical practices, based solely on his religious and political beliefs. I have received numerous calls today from area parents and concerned local residents who feel that Mr. Mullens is a good teacher, who has encouraged and inspired his students to think critically and independently and is innocent of all charges, both spoken and written. In fact the administration of Brookeland High School made attempts to urge students to sign a list of alleged charges against Mr. Mullens of which over 100 students out of 103 refused to sign. The students attempted to present to the Board of education a petition in support of Mr. Mullens and refuting any charges of inappropriate language made against him. The principal of Brookeland High School not only refused to take this petition to the board but forbade the students from such actions. Mr. Mullens is being railroaded by a school board of which all of those who support his removal are members of the same church — a church whose pastor has openly called for there to be only Christian teachers in the Brookeland school district. Currently the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center is in contact with several local and national civil rights organizations in Texas, who will be contacting Mr. Mullens, investigating this situation and offering their support, but if anyone out there knows any other resource that can be brought in to stop this injustice, I ask you please contact us, and forward this out to them.

Yep, those conservative Christians are soooooooooooooooo put upon here in Texas.

Sidebar: My advice to Mr. Mullens? Sue their theocratic asses for defamation.

Via P.Z. Myers. A newspaper in the area has the story here.

Shorter Donna Garner:

From: Donna Garner
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 11:59 AM
To: Donna (2) Garner
Subject: JEFFREY DAHMER, SERIAL KILLER, BELIEVED IN EVOLUTION — WHY “WEAKNESSES” NEEDS TO STAY IN TEXAS SCIENCE STANDARDS — 1.31.09

• Hey, evilutionists! You must answer for Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Lorenzo Gilyard, Ed Gein, Gary Ridgway, Dennis Rader and Jack the Ripper! So there! *Raspberry*

Plato once said that for everything that exists, there is a perfect form of it somewhere. A perfect human being, a perfect chair, a perfect stick, so that everything is a shadow of that one perfect form. Now, if we follow that train of thought, that means that somewhere in the universe there exists the perfect form of the perfect absolute and complete idiot and he left here an hour four hours ago.

Capt. Matthew Gideon, Babylon 5: Crusade, “The Rules of the Game”

*Ahem*:

I told you last month that Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was invited to speak at Florida State University. The FSU president defended the idea by asserting: “Danger lies not in some speaker’s ideas. Danger lies in teaching students that ideas they don’t agree with are not important.”

Sadly, but predictably, conservative ideas with which liberals on FSU’s campus disagree were not important enough to allow within Bill Ayers’ earshot. At the event earlier this week, students and other protesters who objected to Ayers’ speech were hauled off to a separate “free speech zone” to protect Ayers’ supporters from being subjected to dissent.

Stalkin’ Malkin IS Blamey Whinehouse!*

Incidentally, Michelle, where were you when the Bush Administration was cordoning protesters off into “First Amendment Zones” several miles BVR? Even The American Conservative railed against the concept of “First Amendment Zones”. And when The American Conservative has more principles than…well, never mind. That’s a rather low bar. A $20 whore has more principles than Michelle Malkin.**

* With apologies to John Stewart and the fine folks at The Daily Show.

** Now watch as Malkin screams “RAAAAAAAAAACIIIIST!” over me comparing her to a prostitute.

As a follow-on to Amanda’s post, a day in the life of a member of the Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Family Association, Focus on the Family Anus, or any of a number of conservative “think tanks” (*WHAP!* OW!):

Dumbski harumphs over the atheist ad blitz in Britain:

Three questions:

(1) What exactly is the probability that there is no God?

p ≈ 0.999999999 with a confidence interval of ± 0.0000000001. See, unlike you God-botherers, we at least leave a little room for doubt. It’s much healthier that way.

(2) In times past the state was concerned that people believe in God because they saw faith as curbing human wickedness (God holds us accountable for our actions and will see that in the end justice is served — so watch what you do).

Maybe in a theocracy. But certainly not in a democracy. Not one that I’d recognize, anyway.

Wouldn’t it therefore be more honest for the atheists to put up the slogan: “There probably is no God. Now watch your back because no one else is.”

No. For the same reasons that Thomas Jefferson argued against theocracy:

If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God.

Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814

A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.

Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82

The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error.

Remarks to James Madison, 1788

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

Remarks to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813

The “Theocracy NOW!” crowd ought to take heed of these next two:

I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.

Letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1799

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.

Remarks to Jeremiah Moor, 1800

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

Letter to Edward Dowse, April 19, 1803

Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.

Letter to N. G. Dufief, 1814

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82

This one seems aimed at the IDiots:

It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

Notes on Virginia

This last one also seems quite appropriate to the IDiots:

The priests of the different religious sects […] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

Letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820

I think I’ve made my point on that angle.

Now as for Dumbski’s Hollywood Atheist slogan, well…let’s just say I should’ve invested in straw futures. Were I to come up with a similar slogan for a conservative Christian ad campaign, it would go something like this:

“God is watching you, heathens! Yes, even you in the shower! Stop having fun, or you’ll be sorry!”

and it would be a hell of a lot more “honest” than Dumbski’s rejoinder.

(3) Is it a coincidence that the world’s leading atheist is also a pathological Darwinist?

Is it a coincidence that the world’s leading creationist is clinically diagnosing an outspoken atheist on ideological grounds?

Tags: BPSDB

Doop-dee-doop*, checkin’ t3h Internetz:

A controversy has erupted at a Mississippi junior high school over allegations that a bus driver and a coach threatened students with punishment for saying Barack Obama’s name.

The incidents became public when outraged parents called the studios of WAPT news in Pearl, Miss. Some said their children were threatened by a bus driver with being written up and taken to the principal’s office, others that their children were told by a girls’ basketball coach they would be suspended.

Reginald Simpson, a student at Pearl Junior High, explained that when students on the bus started saying, "Obama is our president," the bus driver told them she didn’t want to hear his name. One kid said, "This is history woman," and according to Simpson, "She pulled over and kicked me and the kid off the bus." They were left waiting at the high school and later taken to their own school.

"They feel like they afraid to say who our president is, cause they afraid they going to be in trouble," Reginald’s mother Canishia told WAPT. "We teach our kids not to be racist, and here it is going on. I just feel hurt by it."

Yep. Conservatives sure have a hard time getting jobs in academia thanks to that vast left-wing academonazi conspiracy.

Bérubé, you’re On Notice™!

* With apologies to the fine folks at Sadly, No!

Texas Board of Education member and Professional Creationist Nutjob Cynthia Dunbar, for her unhinged fearmongering rant about an Obama presidency. And yes, she’s a product of that diploma mill known as Regent University!

Perhaps we ought to try and get her law license revoked for the good of society. Her anti-Obama screed and attempts to push Genesis 1:1 as the only acceptable science textbook certainly qualify as “Influencing improperly a government agency or official.” And if nothing else, she’ll be so busy defending her meal ticket that she won’t have time to try to turn Texas’ public schools into Christianist indoctrination centers.