Thursday, May 08, 2003
Good thing about today: took the calculus AP test, so I got to come home right after it, that is, around 12, a good two hours early.
Bad thing about today: took the calculus AP test, and bombed it.
Oh well. I guess I'll just have to take the good with the bad, n'est-ce pas? Alas for my complete and utter lack of mathematical reasoning skills.
Did anyone else read this article today? About the Bush administration 'quietly' relaxing some of the laws that keep church and state separate? Those sneaky little flange baskets. If you haven't read it yet go read it. It is highly disturbing.
The reason I zeroed in on this article in the paper is because we've already had a little taste of it at our school. A few weeks ago we had some people come into the school and present an assembly. It was on the subject of sexual abstinence, which is OK so far as that goes. Not necessarily a bad thing to have an assembly on in high school. The organization who presented and ran this assembly are religiously affiliated. They are, if I remember correctly, a particularly rabid version of Christian evangelical folks who are against sex, drugs, and also rock and roll. I kid you not. I'll try to get their website from someone and post it later.
Anyways, I guess they didn't overtly use religion in their presentation, because the school made them promise that they wouldn't beforehand, but they are very definitely a religious group. And their presentation was very definitely full of fakery, trickery, and flimsy biological explanations that any idiot who's ever taken a bio class could rip apart in minutes. If you have sex before you get married, you're automatically doomed to a divorce? If you have sex before you get married, a chemical in your brain runs out and makes it impossible for you to ever become close to anyone? I mean, come on. If you're going to be insane religious evangelists, at least don't be stupid insane religious evangelists. Or at the very, very least, don't assume that your audience is full of credulous idiots.
My point being that, among the other things these people did that piss me off, they didn't rely on valid scientific evidence of why premarital sex is bad to try and convince us poor vulnerable kids. They used religion and morality almost straight up, only they put them behind a ridiculously thin screen of wildly inaccurate claims, and they didn't actually use the words 'religion' or 'morality'.
OK, so bad, pseudo-scientific, thinly-veiled religious anti-sex presentation at my school. What, you ask, does this have to do with the lovely Bush government slowly but surely doing away with the separation of church and state? For one thing, this was a religious group at a public school. For another, this group is FEDERALLY FUNDED (red flag! red flag!). And finally, this religious, condescending, medically illiterate group is federally funded as part of Bush's education plan specifically so that they will go and speak to public schools.
Is no one else severely disturbed by this? Bush's education plan is spending money on these crazed religious frauds to impose their possibly-admirable-but-all-the-same-fanatic moral views on kids? There's a school in... Maine, I think it is, which is having to cut back its school day by an hour or so because they don't have the funding to keep it as it is now. Wouldn't federal money be better spent there? And besides all that, since when does the federal government pay religious groups to give presentations at public schools?
I shudder in anticipation of the future if things keep going in the same direction. We'd better not get another Republican president in the next election.
In other, happier news! The blog of Iraqi Salam Pax, Where is Raed?, is finally back after along and worrying hiatus. Obviously electricity and Internet access were rather disrupted for a time, but through a series of friends and contacts Salam has posted again. It's pretty good stuff to read. I have heard some doubts as to the authenticity of this blog, but I have heard a lot more valid sources touting the authenticity of it. Read it with a grain of salt if you wish, but read it all the same. It's definitely good to get a view from someone who's there.
In other, other news. Just in case you haven't read the previous post, I love Nightcrawler. You should too. If you wish to discover the joy that is Nightcrawler, I suggest Blue-Elf.com or BAMF Central. There's also a neat little Nightcrawler comic that does great justice to the religious side over at the Crawlspace. It's under the somewhat inauspicious heading 'Blast from the past', but definitely have a look at it, very very neat little 8 page comic, and the artwork's not half bad either.
aww. how could you hate that face?
That's all, as the brother is about the behead himself in his rage and desire to use the computer.
not that that would be a bad thing...
4:52 PM
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