More fall-out from Dover
The Southern Baptist Convention yesterday refused to support a serious resolution calling on the conservative religious group to develop an exit strategy for removing all Southern Baptist children from the nation's public schools to be educated in religious schools or home-schooled by their parents.
Why? Because the two sponsors of the resolution are upset that increasing numbers of public schools teach tolerance for gay people, and because of the federal court ruling by District Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg, Pa., last December barring the so-called theory of Intelligent Design from being taught as science in public schools. The majority of the Southern Baptist leadership wasn't exactly unsympathetic to their concerns, but appeared to worry about the magnitude of the step. They urged Southern Baptists to "engage" the system by running for school board. That sort of "engagement," of course, is what ultimately led the Dover School District down the costly and damaging road to Intelligent Design. I don't think any of the school board members were Southern Baptists, but the key ones were members of fundamentalist churches of other stripes.
And always homosexuality. The devils again. I'll be interested in seeing whether the nearly identical bills introduced by Sen. Connie Williams, D-Montgomery, and Rep. Ed Wojnaroski, D-Cambria, to require public schools to develop anti-bullying and student intimidation programs founders on conservative religious opposition. I've read of this happening in certain areas, of fundamentalist church leaders demanding that student "witnessing" against gay students not be considered bullying or intimidation, on spurious "religious freedom" grounds.
If conservative religious leaders demanded the right for their young people to preach in the hallways of public schools in favor of black slavery or Jewish collective guilt for the death of Christ (both were once seriously argued by certain large churches, though not all) they would rightly be considered wackjobs. Why isn't a demand to bully gay students or students perceived as gay with sermons about their supposedly worthless lives in the same category?
There is a reason the Founding Fathers insisted on separation of church and state, and you're seeing it here. Whose church would set the rules if it were otherwise? My own Episcopal Church, which welcomes gays and embraces science, or the Southern Baptists, who put the Bible over science and despise gays? Why not fight it out? Shed a lot of blood to see whose God is stronger. Force the losers to adopt the religion of the winners under pain of death. Thankfully, the Founding Fathers had seen enough of that in Europe and decided on a new and better way.