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This past week has offered the collector a vast
assortment of prominent people saying stupid things,
but first prize should probably go to Robert K. O. B-1
Bob
Dornan. He once represented California's 46th
congressional district and was steadfast in delivering
defense contracts to the folks at home in Orange
County.
Even so, he lost a bid for re-election in 1996, and his contributions to public discourse have since been limited to appearances as a talking head on various cable channels.
Late one night last week, he was on Fox News -- a channel that appeared on our TCI line-up after Rupert Murdoch paid John Malone $10 a head to replace some good channels with his propaganda ministries.
But my TV lacks an S-Chip
to block stupid
programming, so I accidentally clicked right into this, and
heard Dornan opine that there would never be any more
school shootings if We posted the Ten Commandments from
the first book of the Bible in every classroom.
No one, at least while I was watching this segment and staying mindful of my blood pressure, bothered to inform Dornan that the Ten Commandments appear in Exodus, the second book of the Bible, and in Deuteronomy, the fifth book, but nowhere in Genesis, the first book.
Perhaps I'm the only one who finds it troubling that people who know so little about the Bible are still encouraged to promote it as a panacea for all modern social woes.
Beyond that, though, Dornan was voicing a sentiment that
is common among American conservatives -- that if we just
put prayer and the Bible back in the classroom where
they belong,
then the students will become virtuous and
just.
Many of these are the same people who tell us that Bill
Clinton presides over the most corrupt administration in
American history,
and that Clinton is an immoral and
ambitious man who has no principles other than advancing
and preserving himself.
While I cannot quarrel with that assessment of this president's general character, it does seem to imply that he's a product of godless secular public schools that instill no moral values.
But the fact is that Clinton attended a Christian parochial school in his youth. I'm not privy to what went on at that school in Hot Springs, Ark., but friends who went to similar schools say they received ample exposure to school prayer, the Bible and the Ten Commandments.
And all this produced, in Bill Clinton, a man who could tell America's students last week that violence doesn't solve anything at the same time that he was ordering more bombs to be dropped on Belgrade.
At any rate, it does seem obvious that a religious education, with daily prayers and much study of the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Bible, did not produce a virtuous product.
We could also examine the formative years of one of the leading butchers of this century -- a man with the blood of at least 20 million people on his hands.
As an impressionable youth, from age 9 to 14, he attended a church-run school in Georgia, then proceeded to five years at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. I've found no details of those curriculums, but it seems reasonable to suppose that prayer and Bible-reading were an integral part of the school day.
By certain right-thinking logic, that should have produced at least a decent human being, if not a saint, but instead it produced Josef Stalin.
If those examples don't suffice, consider this. The critics of the public schools, among them many right-thinkers (but I agree with them here), constantly harp that our schools do a generally terrible job with plain academic subjects: grammar, spelling, geography, history, mathematics, etc.
You've certainly read things like three out of four
high school seniors don't know what decade the Civil War
occurred in.
And yet the schools do devote considerable energy to imparting this knowledge.
Given that, why would anyone think that, even if the institutions fail in these academic areas, they would succeed in imparting moral values or the Ten Commandments?
Beyond that, which Ten Commandments did Dornan want to post in every American classroom? Should the list come from Exodus or Deuteronomy? From the King James, Douai, Revised Standard or New International translation, or one of the many others? Perhaps from the Hebrew Torah or the Greek Septuagant?
This could go on interminably -- and Dornan was hardly the only contender in stupidity sweepstakes.
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