[BREAK] Crooks And Liars has a great post up today, Culture Warriors In Action and I salute Nicole Belle on her putting together of a hat trick of recent fundamentalist attempts to keep our kid's minds walking some straight and narrow path, with blinders and earplugs so they are never allowed to view/hear any aspects of life on our planet that does not conform with the exact faith-based dictates of that family's religion. (It is also nice to see reporting on something other than the child molesting Congressman Foley. If all you read are the headlines in our nation's newspapers, you might mistakenly think Iraq was peaceful (Attacks in Baghdad Kill 13 U.S. Soldiers in 3 Days) and that nothing of import was happening elsewhere on the globe (Al-Qaeda's Far-Reaching New Partner). Even George Will, with George F. Will - What Goeth Before the Fall, weighs in on Foley today, putting today's top story in its Republican/religious context:

To a Republican Party increasingly defined by the ascendancy of the religious right, the Foley episode is doubly deadly. His behavior was disgusting, and some Republican reactions seem more calculating than indignant.

But on Crooks and Liars, at least one story never mentions the Florida Republican . . . and I give thanks for that. As one who believes religions have, overall, done more good than harm in the course of human history, I find myself compelled to vainly attempt to keep the good/bad scales of religious contribution heavy on the good side by pointing out when man's flaws have him misusing faith in a manner that throws those scales out of whack. Like the attempts highlighted by Ms. Belle, in which parents seem to believe that their God is ashamed of the bodies He/She created, wanted children to be bereft of imagination and wonder and would like to attend bonfires, if the right books were being torched. I might agree with those who would say I've been crying "Wolf!" for way too long now on this issue of primarily math/reading education (aided by the unfunded No Child Left Behind . . . or No Child Left Sentient?), with no classroom introduction to anything requiring more than a rote playback of the teacher's/book's words/text . . . except THERE REALLY IS A WOLF (see Jennifer Booher-Jennings - Rationing Education for just one example), he's expanding his territory daily and he's been busy snacking on much of our future generations' critical thought portion of their gray matter. (And I'm not even going into the cultural bias aspect or the military recruitment aid of the NCLB act.) But this wolf doesn't come in sheep's clothing. He comes as governmental regulation that forces history, civic, geography, literature and the arts to be left out of curricula. He also comes as a "man of God", one who will quickly testify that she/he is surely not trying to remove knowledge from the reach of the children; he/she only wants to purify that knowledge through a moral filter in order to have it conform to the dictates of an ancient and important instrument of his belief system. Thus, evolution, carbon dating, archeology, geology, medicine -from stem cells through euthanasia - and other areas of knowledge must be removed, or worse, altered so it fits into the subject knowledge of a handful of men who authored portions of a book over two millennia ago. CAUTION: Suicidal blogger will attempt to more firmly grasp this live third rail here, and try to come away unharmed. [/BREAK]