The Never Ending Battle

The political fight over religion in schools got cranked up a notch. Texas what to put clergy in place of school counselors! Now what could possible go wrong with that idea?

Inside the anti-LGBTQ effort to put Christianity back in schools
Some Christian pastors and politicians argue that school prayer would prevent children from identifying as transgender. LGBTQ rights advocates are fighting back.
NBC News
By Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton
October 3, 2023

Political and religious leaders who have long fought to put God and prayer back in schools are seizing on a growing backlash against transgender people to advance their agenda.

Some evangelical pastors who regularly deliver sermons in support of school prayer have recently added a twist — preaching that Christian traditions are needed in classrooms to stop children from identifying as transgender.

At national conservative gatherings, politicians and activists have been attempting to draw direct connections between the lack of religious instruction in schools and the growing acceptance of transgender people in mainstream culture.

That will solve all of our nation’s ills! What we need of good old fashion “Holier than thou” competition to see who can pack the school with the most religion!

And I think you know who is cranking up all of this hubbub?

“School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place,” former President Donald Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. “You can’t teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant.”

[…]

Trump, like other GOP politicians, is tapping into an ascendent evangelical movement that rejects church-state separation as a false doctrine and views LGBTQ acceptance as a threat to America.

Yup… the cult leader himself.

Brockman, who has spent years studying the influence of far-right Christian activism, said some evangelical leaders see the vitriolic backlash against transgender people, LGBTQ children’s books and gender-affirming medical care as a powerful new tool to motivate followers.

In Grapevine, newly elected school board members backed by a far-right Christian cellphone company approved a sweeping plan last year that, among other things, banned mention of “gender fluidity” from libraries and classrooms, which the document defined as any belief that “espouses the view that biological sex is merely a social construct.”

The Bible-thumpers want you to believe their narrow views… this is it or you are going to hell!

The thing is that there are many, many more religious views than the Born-agains but they feel that they are all fake religions but their own.

“To watch faith weaponized in that way, I think, is really scary,” said Ricardo Martinez, the CEO of Equality Texas, an LGBTQ advocacy group. “That’s not a faith I recognize. It’s not the empathy, the compassion, the grace that I learned attending my church.”

The affirming churches must speak up, their silence is complicity. They must demand equal time with the media, they have to make it known that they do not condone the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, that it is not their beliefs.

In the months that followed, Schatzline and other Republicans in Texas passed bills banning gender-affirming medical care for minors, restricting drag performances and giving public schools authority to hire religious chaplains to serve as unlicensed counselors.

In an interview, Schatzline said he supports public policies rooted in Christian morals, which he described as the foundation of American society. While denying that Republicans want to force their religion on anyone, Schatzline said he does not believe in the separation of church and state as it has been applied by federal courts in recent decades.

The idea was meant “to keep the state out of the church,” Schatzline said, “not to keep the church out of the state.”

[…]

One goal of restoring religious traditions in schools, Barton told an audience that included local school board members, was to draw a legal challenge that could serve as a test case to overturn the separation of church and state.

Some churches are speaking up. Spectrum News in Texas reported...

On a recent call with pastors, Abbott encouraged them to promote school choice from the pulpit on Oct. 15.

“It's not going to be something laden in politics, where you're supporting a candidate, or a party, or anything like that. You're supporting a cause, a cause that aligns with what God expects of us,” Abbott said.

Although there were several pastors who support school choice on the call, not everyone is happy about the governor’s request.

“It's a shame to try to engage the religious community into wanting and supporting what most of us believe will be a total destruction of public education. And for him to try to use religion and the faith community to do that is terrible,” said Bishop John D. Ogletree, Jr. of First Metropolitan Baptist Church in Houston.

When you put religion back in schools you end up with incidents like these that was reported in the Hechinger Report.

Increasingly incensed, Russell felt her daughter’s experiences were symptomatic of the school system’s extensive promotion of evangelical Christianity, also evident in routine prayers at school board meetings, graduations and sporting events. “Teachers, administrators, other staff of the schools — they set the temperature in terms of what was accepted,” she told me. Worried that her daughter would become more of a target for her peers, however, she did not complain directly to Bossier Parish schools. Instead, Russell and her husband began to contemplate moving away.

[...]

 The first signs of trouble began a few years after the family’s move. Russell’s daughter, who did not want her name used to maintain her privacy, came home from school one day with the report that some boys on the school bus had interrogated her and other children about their religion. They asked each student, “Are you a believer in God?” The girl, who liked attending her Unitarian church but did not believe in God, recalled that she told her questioners, “‘No.’ And they said, ‘You’re going to hell.’”

 

[...]

 

When her youngest son came home from elementary school with a prayer to Jesus in his folder and instructions to memorize it, she complained to his teacher, but the practice continued. “His teacher told him he was going to hell if he wasn’t a Christian,” she remembered. “He had nightmares.” At first, she was fearful about joining the suit because she did not want her children to suffer more. “Kids were like, ‘If you don’t love Jesus, you can’t be my friend,’ ” she said.

The question is “Whose religion” do you think they are talking about the Jewish or Muslim or Buddhism or Hinduism? No they want only Christian religion but not just any Christian religions only evangelical Christians.

They want to create a evangelical Christian Taliban.