From: adamsr@netcom.com (Rick Adams)
Subject: Re: Limiting religious speech
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 92 21:38:32 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)

Thus spake aultj@rpi.edu (Jim Ault): 

>Not nearly as much as the National Education Association already
>dictates what everyone's children shall and will be taught.  And they
>continue to fight tooth and nail for their own agenda.  Have you read
>their resolutions lately? 
>
>Maybe you agree with what they want to teach, I don't. 
>
	The difference is, you want to muzzle speech - I want to permit it.

	POINT: You claim that relaxation techniques are attempts to
indoctrinate children with Eastern religious practices, when in fact they
are very standard psychological tools with no relationship to Eastern
religion whatever. Yet you demand their removal.

	POINT: You want to eliminate programs of sex education which are
PROVEN to reduce the spread of STDs (including AIDS) and to reduce the teen
pregnancy rates and to replace these scientifically accurate programs with
morality lessons based on your own religion.

	POINT: You insist that any teaching which does not support your own
religious beliefs is wrong and should be removed - yet you snivel and whine
if anyone wants to ban any reference to your superstitious nonsense from
being used as a basis for teaching in our schools.

	You insist on the right to determine values not only for yourself
and your children - but for others as well, both through your attempts to
remove any reasonable educational responses to today's major problems which do
not support your particular superstition and by attempting to censor the
materials accessible to others who do not share your beliefs. Your AFA cult
attempts to ban every piece of material that sexually excites its perverted
leader Donald Wildmon, which includes nearly everything from the Simpsons to
Sesame Street!

	I do not choose to be censored by uptight, moralistic, hypocrites
such as Wildmon - nor do I choose to have the schools influenced by a small
group of brainwashed basket cases who are so busy licking Wildmon's feet
that they haven't the time to become part of the 20th century. 

	If you don't like your children being exposed to reality, enroll
them in a Christian school or home school them. And if you don't like
sexually oriented materials, don't read them. But leave other people who
want scientific and psychologically healthy educations for their children,
and the right to choose their own reading matter alone.

>I certainly have the right to participate in the political process to
>affect public policy (voting for officials that share my beliefs, etc).
>
>Being an informed voter, and informing your own elected officials of
>your views in order that they may represent you is not "dictating"
>anything.

	Quite true. But organizing boycotts of firms which sell materials
you don't want to read, threatening politicians with organized actions to
prevent their re-elections if they don't support your position, and
organizing community meetings at which educational issues are supposedly to
be discussed while preventing those who oppose your view from speaking (ALL
of which are actions and tactics commonly employed by the AFA), while hiding
behind the protections of a legal status as a religious organization rather
than admitting to status as a right-wing political organization subject to
taxation and liability laws is not "participating in the political process,"
it is manipulating the system to forward a private agenda!

	If you and your AFA friends are so convinced that secular humanism
is a religion, then by all means make that point a political issue. I would
LOVE to see secular humanism defined as a religious - it would mean that
secular schools would enjoy the same tax and other benefits as a church
school, that the speech of secular humanists would be protected as religious
speech, that those of us who home school for academic reasons would have a
religious basis for our actions (the ONLY valid reason in TN and some other
states), and that secular humanist publications INCLUDING those dealing with
human sexuality would be protected as religious writings and not subject to
any form of censorship. Are you SURE you want to consider secular humanism a
religion?

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