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By Lee Duigon
April 19, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

What will it take to convince America’s Christian parents to stop sending their children to the public schools?

Earlier this month, a girl at Pilgrim High School in Warwick, Rhode Island, had her artwork censored by “educators.” The student had painted a mural that was deemed objectionable because it depicted a boy growing up, marrying, and having a child. In fact, the “educators” found it so offensive that they ordered it blotted out by painting over it.

The girl’s parents called a local radio talk show to complain, and the fat was in the fire. (Full story, plus photos)

Responding to public outrage, the superintendent of schools overruled the high school censors and allowed the student to paint her mural as she pleased, and the school board chairwoman said “the order to paint over the traditional marriage portion of the artwork should never have happened.”

Had the parents not called the radio show, and had the school district not been dragged onto center stage as an example of political correctness run amok, the censorship order would have stood. Marriage and the family, at Pilgrim High School, would have remained, for all practical purposes, obscene.

The story is not that the censorship was overruled. The story is that public educators think that marriage and the family are obscene. Really—what if kids should have to pass by that mural on their way to a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting? They shouldn’t have to see something like that!

School officials didn’t actually use the word “obscene.” What they did say was, “[S]some of the members of the Pilgrim High School community suggested that the depiction of a young man’s development may not represent the life experiences of many of the students at Pilgrim High School,” and that therefore the assistant principle “asked” the student “to look at other ways to show the outcome of the subject’s progression to adulthood.” Need we ask what “other ways” would have been found acceptable?

What a load of hypocritical, oily, pusillanimous bunk. But actions speak louder than words; and their actions said, loud and clear, “We find marriage and family life obscene.”

We object to having to qualify marriage by calling it “traditional marriage” as if there were any other kind. There are only marriage and various relationships that are not marriage, no matter what you call them.

What do Christian fathers and mothers think they’re getting, by sending their children to be educated by persons who find marriage so offensive that they must paint over a picture of a family? Day after day, five days a week for thirteen years, kindergarten through twelfth grade, the children of Christians see and hear what their “teachers” think of Christian life and faith. Can the parents be so deluded as to think this has no effect? Has it never occurred to them that they themselves, merely by sending their children to those schools to hear those messages, are tacitly consenting to those messages?

A Christian father once told me it didn’t matter what his children were being taught in public school, “because I just de-program them every day.” What kind of thinking is that? How will he answer, if the child asks, “Gee, Dad, if what they’re teaching me in school is wrong, then why do you make me go there?” But of course very few children get de-programmed every day; so the kids are bound to take it for granted that Mom and Pop approve of the school’s teachings.

Everybody has his own rationalization for why his kids must go to public school. Homeschooling? “We can’t do it, we both have to work—and anyhow, we don’t know anything about how to be teachers.” Christian school? “We can’t afford it! Besides, there isn’t a good Christian school anywhere around here.” Then there’s the whole potpourri of excuses. “It’s the only way my daughter can be in the band. They’ve got a real good chess program for my son. I once heard about a homeschooled kid who got eaten by an alligator. And all those problems that you hear about, they’re only in those other schools, in other towns, in other states. Our own schools don’t have anything like that going on.”

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We dare anyone to say, “Hey, it gets the kids out of our hair all day, and it’s free! We have to pay the school tax whether we use the schools or not, so we might as well use them. If one of us had to stay home to teach the kids, or if we had to pay for Christian school tuition, we wouldn’t have the money for video games and cable TV and vacations.”

Besides which, not one bit of that anti-Christian, anti-family stuff goes on at our school!

Meanwhile, our highly-trained education professionals continue to dumb America down, lower the bar of deviancy, preach immoral lifestyles, and train Christian children not to be Christian anymore.

Is it any wonder God is angry with us?