Replies

The court made it perfectly clear: the school system has a duty to prevent children from adhering to their parents' beliefs.
Talk about spin! The decision reiterated that public schools are no place to promote any particular religious beliefs. If the parents don't like it, they always have the option of private school.

Or even, like, discussing what they believe, and why, with their children over dinner.

"Whether a student accepts the Board’s invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a creationist text, or follows the Board’s other suggestion and discusses “Origins of Life” with family members, that objective student can reasonably infer that the District’s favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion. Second, by directing students to their families to learn about the “Origins of Life,” the paragraph performs the exact same function as did the Freiler disclaimer: It “reminds school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by their parents on the subject of the origin of life,” thereby stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt, to protect a religious view from what the Board considers to be a threat."

"Or even, like, discussing what they believe, and why, with their children over dinner."

No! Not That! Sheesh...you mean that families should speak to each other while eating food? I've never heard of such a thing. Get this started, and pretty soon you'll have families discussing things even when they're not having meals. We can't have that!

Mealtime is to be conducted with a pair of bored parents who rarely speak to each other, along with any of their offspring who aren't at a friend's house, on a date, anorexic, or terminally bored.

Said offspring must sit at the table with incredibly bored expressions and pick at their food, heaving great sighs of dissatisfaction before leaving the table to watch porn or work on their MySpace blog on their computer while eating nacho cheese chips out of the bag.

The very idea that discourse should happen while eating has been thoroughly debunked. It is a thing of the past, and must be discarded, along with all other relics of family life from those days.