KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WHY DOES IT TAKE A JUDGE TO SORT OUT NONSENSE IN SCHOOLS?

Ever wonder at the rise of the home-schooling movement, now said to be educating between one and two million children, or the spread and growth of Christian schools that didn't exist in most areas of the country when I was growing up as recently as the 1960s? I was appalled by a wire story that was buried inside an edition, last weekend, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Here are relevant excerpts from an article headlined:

"Judge says one N.Y. school district violated the rights of Catholic families":

"WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- A federal judge ruled Friday that a school district violated the religious rights of three Catholic families by having youngsters cut out elephant-head images of a Hindu god, make toothpick `worry dolls' and build an altar for an Earth Day liturgy.

"U.S. District Judge Charles Brieant ordered the Bedford Central school to stop the activities and give clear instructions about Supreme Court standards for the separation of church and state.

"The case began in 1995, when students in the well-to-do Westchester County district began playing the strategy card game Magic: The Gathering. Some parents complained that the cards, ranging from fairies to a woman about to be sacrificed, were satanic.

"The two-day trial ... brought a parade of witnesses, including a yogi numerologist, a psychic-telepath and a minerologist who denied that crystals have special powers.

"Brieant rejected the families' claims about yoga lessons, cemetery visits and the use of the card game. But he said he found `subtle coercive pressure to engage in the Hindu religion' when a third-grade teacher, in a lesson about India, had her pupils make construction-paper cutouts of elephant heads after reading a story about Ganesha, an elephant-headed Hindu god. ..."

"Build an altar for an Earth Day liturgy"? What in the name of somebody's pagan god is going on? Imagine parents' having to go to federal court, with all the trouble and expense that involves, just to redress such nonsense.

As observed here many times before, the real story is the lack of more public outcry against this stuff. One wishes we could say that stories such as these are confined to distant parts. Two years ago, a parent of a gifted child attending summer school in this part of our state informed me that the curriculum for her first-grader was explicitly multicultural and that the children were taught to recite a "Pledge of Allegiance to the World." "Cemetery visits" are doubtless part of the "death education" movement with which many public schools have become enamored, as too many of them have moved away from traditional academics to embrace every loony fad that comes out of a college of education somewhere. Public school leaders must turn away from this nonsense, or watch growing public support for alternatives, coupled with the financial means to support them, explode.

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What is the agenda of those now pushing for still more gun control?

Here, from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, is anti-gun lawyer Dennis Henigan, one of many pushing their lawsuits against gun manufacturers: "The gun-violence problem is more than the problem of guns in the hands of bad people. It's also a problem of guns in the hands of good people." In a recent New Yorker article on the gun-control debate, Peter J. Boyer paraphrases Henigan as saying, "Guns should be thought of as pathogens (i.e., a disease-causing agent), and gun ownership, perhaps, as a disease."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.