Indiana has gotten a lot of attention lately for their religious tyranny law, but let’s not forget that Tea Party gulag-in-the-making, Michigan. Republican anti-education efforts don’t get much worse than the Tea Party’s own Michigan State Rep. Gary Glenn’s (R-Larkin Township) House Bill 4394.
As Michigan-based Eclectablog explains,
If Glenn’s bill – House Bill 4394 – becomes law, schools can hire anyone they want. The criteria currently used would be tossed out the window. The bill literally strikes out all of the criteria. In addition, it removes the words grades “9 through 12″ meaning that schools could hire anyone they wish, with or without a teaching certificate, for any grade level. No training as an educator required.
Can you imagine being a parent in a state where suddenly your children’s competent, trained teachers are fired and replaced with any Tom, Dick, or Harry, whose sole qualification is that he or she is willing to work for a fraction of what a teacher would be paid?
Can you imagine the effect on the state’s educational standards? Can you imagine the effect on your children when they go to school and are told that the earth is flat and only 6000 years old?
As the father of a fourth-grader, I can imagine the effect on my blood pressure.
Bad as this seems, it could get worse, believe it or not. And as these things go, it does: Glenn’s fellow Representative, Todd Courser, an attorney in real life, who represents the 82nd District, posted his own brilliant idea on Facebook. Courser later deleted the post, but Electablog was able to capture it (below):
As you can see, Courser opposes “Soviet-style” central planning, and like most Republicans, he seems to think Common Core standards are federally imposed standards (they are not). Courser is an attorney, mind you. He should know better. But then a lot of Republicans, Ted Cruz included, should know better.
So instead of the public schools our Founding Fathers envisioned, education should return to being a ministry of the church. Excuse me, but I think that’s what the Founding Fathers wanted to move away from.
When Pink Floyd sang that “we don’t need no education,” I don’t think church ministries are what they had in mind.
Look, I know Ted Cruz has said, “This country remains a country, I believe, grounded in values, grounded in faith, but far too many Christians have ceded the public arena to people who aren’t believers,” but come on.
And while we’re talking about the lunatics representative the Republican Party in state after state, I can’t leave out Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen, R-Snowflake. It know it’s a whole other state, but trust me, it’s relevant: Allen actually told the state’s appropriations committee on Tuesday that corrupt souls are at the root of our nation’s problems (as opposed to whack-a-doodle’s like her) and that therefore,
We are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have. We should probably be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.
Yes, because that jibes so well with the First Amendment!
In case you don’t believe it, here’s the video:
I guess while we’re forced to sit in church it would be a good time to be forced (at gunpoint) to listen to David Barton. Then Mike Huckabee could get his wish too. I guess this would be a sort of jobs bill, because then the GOP could give all those open-carry enthusiasts jobs pointing guns at us, because that’s the only thing that could get many of us into a church.
On Wednesday, Allen told the Arizona Capitol Times that while it was a “flippant” comment, she would not apologize for the comment. What the Times carefully did not mention is that, as Right Wing Watch reveals,
Allen is the very same lawmaker who defended uranium mining in her state by insisting that the earth is a mere 6,000-years-old…She also proposed that the state enable the creation of a volunteer border militia and pushed for a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, warning that gay marriage would harm children and destroy Social Security.
Yes, gay people – not the Republican Party – are going to destroy social security.
That seems bad enough, but she also “Allen even offered a bill to protect her son-in-law who was under investigation for harassing female inmates while working in a country prison.” The young Republican was apparently forcing female inmates to give him oral sex.
I’m sorry, but as a metaphor of the Republican War on Women, I can’t think of a more apt metaphor.
If only the mainstream media would tell people the truth about their elected representatives. You have to wonder how many of them would get elected again, if they only knew.
It is interesting how Republicans think if only we “put the Bible back in school” and force people to go to church, our “free” society can be saved. But what’s free about coercion?
Of course, our young people won’t know what “coercion” means if Michigan’s Courser and Glenn get their way. After all, it doesn’t matter who teaches the scriptures. Anyone can do that, and the Bible’s the only textbook kids really need.
It’s much easier for the elites to lead them around by the nose that way. And really, it does put them a step above Europe’s serfs in that those poor unfortunates had to have the Bible read to them.
See how progressive the Republican Party is! If you want to know just how progressive, check out with Cindy Gamrat and Todd Courser have been up to in Michigan with their “contract for liberty,” which would dismantle the Constitution just the way the Founding Fathers intended, and their “life at conception” legislation to do away with that pesky freedom women have to control their own reproductive functions, and finally, their plans to turn Michigan into a theocracy, yay!
Fortunately, Eclectablog explains that they “have heard from multiple sources that the Republicans in the state legislature are doing everything in their power to make sure these two, along with [Cindy] Gamrat, are not seen as representing the Republicans as a whole and that they are neutralized and unable to have an impact that would harm their brand.”
Let’s hope this is true.
Edit [3.28.15, 2:31 pm] A previous version of this post had a typo referring to Eclectablog as Electablog.
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