Much ado about nothing
Anyone hear about the "scandal" last week involving Secretary of Education Rob Paige? He was quoted as telling a Baptist Press reporter that, "All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community." The usual suspects went nuts - the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the LA Times, Senators Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy. The story was touted as proof that Secretary Paige was planning to desecularize the nation's K-12 public schools; there were calls for his resignation.
And the aftermath? Peter Wood of National Review supplies the entire quote from the interview:
In the interview, [Secretary Paige] had been responding to a question about colleges, not public schools. And in fact the transcript of the interview bears this out. The interviewer, Todd Starnes asked: Given the choice between private and Christian — or private and public universities, what do you think — who do you think has the best deal?
What Starnes may have meant by "best deal" is by no means clear, but Paige answered:
That's a judgment, too, that would vary because each of tem have real strong points and some of them have some vulnerabilities. But, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school where there's a strong appreciation of values, the kind of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, and so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally.
Paige, in other words, declares that he would prefer to send his child to a Christian college that emphasizes Christian values. So what? A very large number of parents feel the same way, and the United States is home to a large number of sectarian colleges and universities. So, in one sense, this turns out to have been a controversy over nothing.
Emphasis mine.
So, if in one sense this was much noise and confusion over nothing, what was the story here? The story is the rush with which the "tolerant" Left is willing to portray someone as a religious bigot, especially when they already disagree with his educational "ideology":
Somewhere in the background to this noisy attack lies the very important question of what kind of society we aim to build through the nation's public schools. The Left's answer is that the schools should promote the ideology of "diversity," which offers a value system based on a hierarchy of supposed victimization. The greater the degree of victimization, the greater the compensatory awards that can be expected from society...
The Left knows what it wants and has largely achieved its vision in the schools as they now stand. Thus its basic stance is to preserve the status quo, as an institution. Secretary Paige, by contrast, offers a program of reform, which threatens the Left...