May 04 2009
Chuck Norris, you are getting sleepy, very sleepy….
Those of you who don’t troll the deeper waters of the wingnut-o-sphere may not be aware that former action movie star Chuck Norris — yes, “Walker, Texas Ranger” himself — is now an honored pundit on conservative Web sites like WorldNetDaily and Townhall. Strangely, his comments section contains no fevered wingnut putdowns about how Hollywood liberals have no business peddling their political views to impressionable Americans.
Anyway, his latest screed has to do with education. One might assume this would be a lusty defense of homeschooling, private school vouchers, and so on, and indeed he starts out with the usual conservative views here, but he eventually fails to make that sharp turn known by the locals in Logicville as “Dead Man’s Curve” and puts his finely tuned pundit’s hot rod into the ravine. The Obama administration is opposed to all his favorite “free market” reforms in education because the government is focused on indoctrination.
The reason that government is cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future….
Is it merely coincidental that the private choice of home schooling was outlawed by the Soviet state in 1919, by Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1938, and by Communist China in 1949?
Lordy, lordy, lordy. Norris is apparently unaware of such phenomena as teenage rebellion and perverse incentives, to name at least two things wrong with his conclusion. That the Obama administration is uninterested in indoctrinating the young into its “socialist” worldview goes without saying as well, but it’s worthwhile to add for contrast’s sake the Bush administration’s rote promotion of abstinence-only sex education, an obsession of the right-wing political-religious establishment that has been proven on multiple occasions to be completely ineffective.
Nevertheless, abstinence-only programs are continuing to receive federal funding despite the fact that they not only don’t work, they actually encourage students to engage in sexual contact, at least the techniques other than conventional intercourse, because oral sex, hand jobs and other approaches don’t result in pregnancy. They can, however, lead to sexually transmitted disease, which groups of “abstinent” kids had in higher percentages than non-abstinent kids in some of these studies. Oh, and abstinence-only programs are high on wildly (read dishonestly) overstating the failure rates of birth control, particularly condoms.
So, Mr. Texas Ranger, I’ll see your paranoid fears of government-sponsored liberal indoctrination and raise you an actual case of government-sponsored conservative indoctrination that is actually counterproductive to its stated purpose. And while I’m at it, if the Obama mind control program manages to convince a few of your fellow wingnuts that the theory of global warming is not a hoax just because we still have winter, that the theory of evolution is behind our medical response to the swine flu and that Darwin’s theory can peacefully coexist with religious belief, then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. (Hat tip to Steve Benen.)
