Here’s an interesting little exercise illustrating how our friends on the right react to a single controversial incident, and how the right-wing noise machine’s echo chamber works.
First, the story in brief.
On Tuesday, a Palo Alto, Calif., middle school held its third annual career day, wherein guest speakers tell about various lines of work. This year’s speakers included a doctor, a pilot and, for his third visit, salesman William Fried.
Fried, who encourages young people to seek work they really want to do and have a talent for, provided a handout listing more than 100 careers. Exotic dancer/stripper was among them. During Fried’s 55-minute talk a student asked why exotic dancing was included. Fried spent a minute responding, saying in part that a woman with the right physique can make as much as $250,000 a year. The substitute teacher in the room raised no objection.
Not surprisingly, some parents were displeased. Principal Joseph Di Salvo was embarrassed and apologetic, although he said he thought the whole thing had gotten a bit overblown. He sent a letter home with students saying Fried’s inclusion of exotic dancing was inappropriate and not something the school condones or wants repeated.
While we doubt any of the 16 students present for Fried’s talk will be catapulted into a life of sleaze because of this, we agree fully with Di Salvo. Suggesting exotic dancing as a career option to middle-school students was completely inappropriate.
With that as background, we can understand our counterparts on the right weighing in with a certain amount of criticism. But not like this, from the popular Captain’s Quarters weblog:
“Our culture increasingly wants to inculcate the message to our daughters that whoring makes a great career and lifestyle choice, whether literally or figuratively. Paris Hilton becomes a superstar for no other reason than a poorly-recorded sexual romp with a paramour that got out to the Internet.”
No, our culture actually increasingly wants to inculcate the message that our daughters can make a great career in the media, like Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters, Paula Zahn, et al. Can make a great career in business, like Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina or investment wizard Abby Joseph Cohen. Can make a great career in law, like Gloria Allred and Victoria Toensing. Can make a great career in politics, like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Republican, or House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.
How, exactly, does Paris Hilton any more typify the message our culture sends to girls about those in entertainment/the performing arts than, say, singer Charlotte Church, who regularly fills concert halls in the U.K. and U.S., sells a whole lot of recordings and appears in concert on Public Television?
The Captain continues:
“Praise God that Di Salvo at least considers it inappropriate, except that mixing God and school is about the only boundary which principals like Di Salvo considers worth fighting for. If Fried had instead talked about serving Jesus Christ as a priest or a minister, do you suppose Di Salvo would have called any controversy overblown? We would have the ACLU screaming for the substitute’s job and secularists would be screaming about the right-wing takeover of the public school system.”
Now the good Captain blows this tempest in a teapot into a wholesale frontal assault on Christianity, bringing in the American Civil Liberties Union for a little slapping around. Note that his diatribe is based on his own pure speculation — pure demagoguery, really.
As we pointed out in a comment at his blog, this is a small, isolated incident with no relevance whatsoever to larger issues. It’s certainly got nothing to do with separation of church and state.
In fact, there’s nothing wrong with discussing religious faith, the history of religions, the key tenets of various religions or religious callings in schools. Schools are OK with all that and so is the ACLU. What they’re not OK with is proselytizing, recruiting, sermonizing, exercises in worship or depicting one religion as the only legitimate religion — things every bit as inappropriate in their way for schools as Fried’s stripper talk was.
Those things aren’t inappropriate for schools simply because some atheist evildoers say so. They’re wrong for schools because ours is a highly diverse and free society in which people of many faiths and of no faith have rights and preferences that are to be respected — as surely as you and we want our own rights and preferences respected.
The alternative is the kind of strife that can tear a nation apart for generations, even for centuries, as in Central Europe, Ireland and the Middle East.
We don’t want that for America. Would that the Captain and his me-too, me-three commenters would finally get it — and honor it.
To see how this kind of thing echoes across the right-wing blogosphere, click the Captain’s Quarters link above, read the comments and then check out the trackback posts on the other blogs listed there.
I want to respond to one of your latter points: We have a mainstream culture in this country, and this culture arose from Judeo/Christian roots. To say we are a “society of many faiths and no faith that have rights and preferences that are to be respected” is a backdoor way of diluting the Judeo/Christian component of mainstream society. I know, I know, you are just asking for a fair and balance approach to religion, but on the ground it gets to be that ANY reference to Christianity, both proselytizing and discussion of religion,gets tossed out for fear of the ACLU.
rightsaidfred, you write that fundamental fairness guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is somehow “a backdoor way of diluting the Judeo-Christian component of mainstream society.”
The Judeo-Christian component of mainstream society is what it is; there’s no diluting it. I think maybe your concern is really that the Judeo-Christian component of American society is losing numbers and dominance.
If it comes to pass that a whole lot more of the population adheres to other faiths or to no faith than to Judaism and Christian faiths, then a lessening of presence and influence will inevitably follow. But that would be a natural consequence of population changes over time, not because of any effort to drive Jews and Christians out or suppress their faiths.
If we hold true to the Constitution’s protections and guarantees, such a change in demographics wouldn’t spell the end of anything for Jews and Christians.
As for fear of the ACLU, I recognize they’re fallible humans who can and do overreach. I’ve written in other posts that while they’re not the bogeymen they’re made out to be, they’re not perfect either.
Even considering there’s some unwise and uncalled for static from the ACLU and nonbelievers, I just don’t see a society where religion isn’t discussed and can’t be discussed in a wide range of places, including schools.
rightsaidfred, thanks again for commenting.
Capt. did the same thing OReilly does all the time. He got that story so he could unload about the ACLU. OReilly gets guests on and he doesnt care what they have to say. He talks over them and says what he wants to say. Same kind of thing.