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Judging by what I read recently in the great organs of
secular-humanist enlightenment, the Religious Right
of America has a conspiracy underway. The alleged plot:
1. With the election of Bill Clinton, the Religious Right lost its clout at the White House; the cause must be nurtured at the grassroots.
2. Nothing is more grassroots than a local school board, and only rural electric co-op board elections attract less in the way of attention, candidates or turn-out.
3. Even so, openly zealous candidates might lose.
4. So, run stealth candidates,
folks who appear
as normal as Rotarians but are in fact secretly pledged to
advance the causes of Religious Right.
One fact should be noted: anyone who promotes public
prayer, in schools or anywhere else, is not a Christian,
for Jesus told his followers that When you pray, go into
your room
and close the door.
The Religious
Right
presumably follows some religion, though, and
perhaps someday we'll learn which one.
Anyway, it's hard to argue that religious fanatics, whatever their creed, can't run for office, or that the public can't elect them.
But, we hear, they run as stealth candidates
who
mislead the public. Indeed. This process is known as
American politics.
Remember Read my lips
and
I'm not sending American boys 8,000 miles to
fight
?
If the stealth candidates
gained school board
seats, they'd quickly learn some sad truths. School boards
serve as rubber stamps for superintendents, and thanks to
union contracts and archaic certification laws, school
boards have less effect on teacher tenure than they do on
the tides.
Suppose the stealth candidates
managed to
surmount these obstacles, and brought back McGuffey
readers, hagiographic American history and morning chants
of the Lord's Prayer. So what? Could they do any worse than
the current educrats with their falling test scores and
rising drop-out rates?
This threat from stealth candidates
is about as
serious as Chicken Little's warning.
So why the concern? Part of it is that the left, like the right, needs to create bogeymen in order to keep the contributions flowing in.
As for the more than 200 Colorado school administrators
who recently spent $397 apiece of our money to attend a
three-day seminar on fighting the Religious Right, well,
the Religious Right shouldn't take that personally. The
educrats will spend freely to keep their power in the face
of any perceived threat, be it Amendment One, vouchers,
stealth candidates
or democracy.
But you or I would the same thing to keep a cushy
$75,000 job, and besides, if they're busy networking to
create optimal strategies for coping with phantoms, then
they're not meddling in anything important where they might
do some actual harm. Better that they fret about stealth
candidates
than start trying to impose the latest fad
in self-esteem enhancement whole-language multi-cultural
curricula.
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