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eaven forbid that schools should have a caring environment.

No, scratch that.  Whatever forbid that schools should have a caring environment.  There, that’s suitably secular for this story from the crumbling edges of our civilization.  And the story is just the start of the story; bear with me.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is bringing a lawsuit against the Cherry Creek schools in Denver because some of the principles taught in the district’s “40 Developmental Assets” program allegedly are drawn from biblical teachings.

For example, Asset 5 in the program, a “caring school climate,” allegedly is related by the institute to the teaching in the New Testament book of Mark, which says, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me,” according to a report in the Denver Post.

The program also recommends students spend an hour or more a week in a religious community, and the complaint alleges that is using tax money to promote religion, the report said.

The foundation, based in Madison, Wis., said in an amended complaint in federal court in Denver it has evidence the Cherry Creek program, developed by the Search Institute, is linked to the Bible. (WND)

The Cherry Creek program has been using Search Institute materials for 15 years, not as curricula but “a behavioral framework” promoted by the schools.  Search the Search Institute’s mission page and you have to look very hard to find a reference to religion on it (the word “congregation” appears once), although its history page reveals it started over 50 years ago as a Luthern program.  This is a program that’s sufficiently un-overt to fit in America’s secular classrooms.

Have we come to the point where merely being “linked to the Bible” is enough to trash something?  Are we now at the place where the suspicion that Search Institute’s core beliefs are Judeo-Christian, even if there aren’t Bible verses all over their stuff,  alone is sufficient to fire up the book-burning machine?

America just happens to be “linked to the Bible” (here, for example), so what are we supposed to do to please/appease the tiny number of crackpots at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, aka the Whining Shrilly That Most People Don’t Believe What I Believe Foundation?  Toss in the towel and become secular fodder for Islamists, like Europe?

Well, before we accept that end, perhaps it’s worthwhile to scan down to the bottom of this article and see what’s going on in schools in the vicinity, since WND’s Web site happily puts together links to related stories; in this case, stories on education:

Teacher falsely tells kids they have fatal disease

Campaign launched to liberate ‘speling’

Student says ‘F— off!’ on test, gets better grade

Today’s class: Hating Jews 101

Bilingual, pro-American book ‘unfit’ for L.A. schools

Female teacher arrest for 9 flings with student

6th-grade survey: Classmate most likely to get pregnant

3rd-graders asked to help classmate in gender change

Children’s hospital launches sex change for kids program

Voting rights challenged in ‘coed showers’ lawsuit

Lord help us!  If we want more of these kinds of terrible goings-on where we educate our precious children, then yes, let’s continue un-linking America from the Bible!

hat-tip: Jim

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T

he best barbecue I’ve ever had? Well, that would be a tie between the Styrofoam clamshell full of fiixin’s lovingly cooked by a bunch of old black guys at a converted gas station in West Louisville, and the spread laid out at the place in the woods in Missouri, where the host was a porky white guy with a plastic pig nose.

Barbecue is the unique and uniting American cuisine that inspires odes of appreciation and passionate debates over the best recipes, whether it’s at NASCAR tailgate parties or southern church picnics or suburban back yards coast to coast. But to Europeans, it all looks very, very different. From a book review by Andrew Leonard on Salon:

To this day, writes [Andrew Warnes, author of "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," and] a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue “has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name.” Barbecue’s early popularization in 18th century London was “wedded to the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery.” In one of the earliest English-language descriptions of this imported cuisine, Ned Ward’s “The Barbacue Feast,” published in 1707, “the whipping of slaves goes hand in hand,” theorizes Warnes, “with the savage barbecuing of meat. Both belong to the production of a new imperial supremacy that can corrupt those it empowers.”

Just because he spent a couple hours reading old documents doesn’t mean Warnes is smart enough to draw logical (as opposed to academic) conclusions from his research. He is a typical academic: He cannot breathe unless he’s over-read every situation he confronts and overloaded his analysis with notions born of false intellectual superiority coupled with belittling analyses of those of us not fortunate enough to be blessed with Warnes-like wisdom.

You see his over-amped brain at work again when he describes the first meeting – over barbecue – of Columbus’ crew with the natives, or Amerindians, as I guess we’re supposed to refer to them today:

Head to head, the Amerindian cooks and Catholic crewmen of Guantanamo Bay magnify the differences of the two worlds, each incarnating and distilling a veritable mass of humanity.

And here I thought they were just guys on a beach. Besides, is Warnes really certain that the misfits who sailed with Columbus reflected the “veritable mass” of European humanity? Let’s find an academic to study that! But I digress …

But this symetrey by no means places Native Americans on an equal footing with their Catholic conquerers. Rather, it lumps Natives together in order to fix them in place as innocent but heathen, and it lumps their conquerers together in order to fix them in the place of natural judges of the New World.

Wow. All because the Amerindians cooked their meat on open fires instead of pots! And if that conclusion is not rash or poetic enough for you, try this one: Warnes equates the delicious barbecued fish with heaven and the “sheer hideousness of the ‘disgusting’” barbecued iguanas with the “temptations and bedevilments of the Garden of Eden.”

So, here’s the bottom line: Europeans refused to be bedeviled and besmirched by heathen open-fire cooking, thereby cementing themselves as the socially superior masters, while we Americans gave in to our dark inner nature and accepted the open-fire cookery, necessitating that we kill all the heathens that brought it to us, then go on seeking other darker-skinned peoples to kill just because “barbarism” and “barbecue” sound so much alike.

Spare me … and pass the spare ribs.

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W

hat sort of people go into the rubber biz?

There was a terrific essay in Esquire about a couple decades back called, as I recall, 20 Years on the Rubber Route, about a scummy, low-life of a guy whose job it was to refill the rubber machines – they weren’t condom machines yet back then – in bars and truck stops around the country. His was a life of stinking restrooms and dirty dives and syphilis and wombs that just couldn’t get impregnated.

Welcome to the world of people who go into the rubber biz. It hasn’t changed a bit it seems, even with the new, phony aura of decency that comes with their vaunted new task of saving bathhouse gays and guy-a-minute porn stars from AIDS:

LifeStyles Condoms wants Miley Cyrus to be its spokesgirl.

The company says it has offered the 15-year-old Disney star — who has said she won’t have sex until she’s married — $1 million to represent the brand.

“Pop culture proves that teens are more ready than ever to discuss the subject of sex,” says the company’s VP of marketing, Carol Carrozza. “We believe that Miley is both influential and relatable to this afflicted set — and is the obvious choice to get the message of safe sex out to teens across America.” (Fox News)

What kind of filthy mind thinks of offering a condom gig to a 15-year-old pop star whose appeal is with an even younger demographic? The obvious answer is a mind that thinks it’s not enough that they profit from high schoolers on up, that it’s time to expose eight and ten year olds to the joy of a little nookie in the back room.

And as one would expect. LifeStyles’ VP of marketing can’t even get a sentence out right, as her mind’s probably too much on her product and its usefulness to her lifestyle. What the heck does she mean “Miley is both influential and relatable to this afflicted set?” Relatable? Afflicted with what? STDs? Already?!

Oh, and finishing the news: Miley’s people said they never even got an offer, so the whole thing is a disgusting proposition wrapped in a lie, and she would have rejected it in any case.  Good thing; I don’t want to ever have to rename this series “Our Crumbled Civilization.”

Hat-tip:  Jim

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T

ime was, the words “family channel” conjured up images of programming that could be enjoyed together by … families. Not too much to ask, eh? Well, in our crumbling civilization it is.

Welcome to ABC’s Family Channel, self-proclaimed as “A New Kind of Family,” as in “a new kind of family entertainment,” as in “entertainment that’s designed to destroy the entire family ethic.” ABC’s tool for this destruction is its new show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

You can view a promo clip here.

From the producers of 7th Heaven – who seem to have lost their moral focus over the years – the show features a high school girl who’s pregnant, a father who deserts his family, various clueless parents, and a vampy girl who says to a boy, “You’re not a nice guy, and I’m not a nice girl” before grinding into him for a sloppy French kiss.

Well, allow them to tell the plot line themselves:

Wholesome 15-year-old Amy Juergens finds out that she’s pregnant, sparking panic among her two best friends, Lauren and Madison. She won’t tell them who the father is, but we catch on when Ricky, fellow marching band member and “drummer,” the won’t forget that special night they spent together at band camp.

But Ricky has his own problems. His girlfriend, Adrian, is about to stand him up to go on an illicit date with the school football star, Jack. Jack’s a devout Christian, just like his beautiful, virginal girlfriend, Grace Bowman, but he finds himself torn between his manly instincts and his promise to God (oh yeah – and his girlfriend).

You get the idea … and this just the beginning of the first episode of this Desperate Housewives gone high school.

Gather up the kids, Honey, let’s all watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager! Then we’ll go into counseling tomorrow! Or just go straight to divorce court!

hat-tip: Jim

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