Fewer than half of all Americans now claim any kind of religious affiliation, but never the less right wing Christians continue to put their religion forward as the solution to all the world's problems. They do this in spite of the fact history does not begin to support their claims. Their obsession with indoctrinating children speaks directly to just how weak their belief system is. It is NEVER the job of our secular government to backstop Christianity or any other religion.
Fundamentalist Christians are running scared, and that is a large portion of the reason why we are increasingly seeing incidents like this which result in court cases, either civil or criminal. I don't anticipate a decrease in such cases, particularly so long as Donald Trump remains in office, and covertly encourages this kind of behavior.
It began with Reagan when he and his handlers invited in the evangelicals with promises they never kept or intended to. What began as a short-term ploy to win an election came back to bite them as the preachers liked their little taste of power and hung around to largely co-opt the Republican party.
Reagan should be forever damned for aligning himself with Jerry Falwell and the not-so-Moral Majority. The whole State / Church thing was already compromised from reactionary efforts that came out of FDR's New Deal (again, I have to cite Keven Kruse's book, One Nation Under God), but Ronnie made things a WHOLE LOT WORSE.
No kidding. We need TERM LIMITS on the Supreme Court. We'll likely get them about the same time that pigs fly without benefit of Boeing, Airbus, or Cessna.
French Conseil Constitutionnel : 9 non permanent members. Every three years, 3 are replaced, 1 proposed by the President, 1 by the Senate president and 1 by Assemblée Nationale president for one 9 years tenure, and only one*. One exception, in case of a replacement, they can be nominated for a full 9 years terms but only if they served for less than 3 years.
* Since 2008, 3/5th of the Parliament is the quorum to refuse a nomination.
More Dominionist Creep/Wak-a-Mole. They want these cases before SCOTUS so bad they can taste it. Theocracy is just one of their goals. Teaching kids not to ask difficult questions and how to short-circuit critical thinking skills is an even bigger goal.
“Riverstone Academy isn’t just violating church-state separation; it’s gambling with children’s education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.”
This is exactly what they want. They don’t want educated children, they don’t want public schools, they don’t even want the constitution. They want to be the only game in town, they want control over everything and they know the best way to get that is to keep the population ignorant. Their children will be educated, separately from the rabble, to be the elite. This is all been plainly expressed over and over since we started public education. Linda McMahon is working on destroying public schools at the federal level, these monsters are working at the local level, we’ve had school board after school board taken over by homeschooling parents from mega churches specifically so they can undermine the schools directly. State legislatures are gerrymandered and the repubelicans there are making laws designed to defund and kneecap the schools on the state level. Then there’s even the media’s involvement in tearing public education to shreds. Repeating lies about litter boxes and writing editorials about how teachers are the devils trying to convince your kids to rebel. It’s all orchestrated by theocrats trying to take over. They almost have what they want, total control. If they get it, I doubt it will last long, but the effects will be devastating for generations to come.
It's a travesty, but I'm unsure if the "legal suit motivation" is disqualifying or not. I guess we would have to look into the Pueblo district or Colorado state rules regarding starting a new school, but i could easily see how those rules didn't anticipate something like this and thus don't have anything in the books about how the board must consider motivational factors.
Hopefully both organizations have the latitude to axe this project without needing to cite a specific reason, just on a vote. But I worry that if ADF and their pet school team has dotted all the i's and crossed the t's on their school plan, then maybe the boards are obligated to treat them as they would any other applicant with the proper paperwork and planning done.
A Heritage staffer who said that if we allow these people into our organisation, "We look like clowns". Actually, you don't, what you look like is a bunch of fascists.
In this administration there is no look too clownish if you show sufficient loyalty. Thus we have a US Prosecutor with no prosecuting experience, a SecDef with no experience running large organizations and who uses social media to discuss ongoing military attacks with family members, and an FBI chief who declares they have a shooter in custody and there's nothing to worry about when the shooter is still at large.
All clowns welcome, so long as you're Trump's clown.
Trump prizes loyalty over any other qualifications, just like Putin wants loyalty rather than ability. If you have ability, expertise, etc., then you are a threat to the leadership (Putin/Trump).
Um, isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horses bolted? The Heritage Foundation are already fascist clowns. They wouldn’t exist if they weren’t.
The phrase, "public Christian School" should be considered an oxymoron as a matter of course. That it wasn't by the officials in Colorado considering this utter mistake is indicative of what Christian nationalists have been trying to do for entirely too long now: breakdown the wall of separation between church and state.
So, of course, this business is going to court. They'll waste time and taxpayer dollars arguing something that should have been intuitively obvious from the start. For the sake of the people of Colorado, let's hope the school is defeated.
i agree with the contradiction in terms however I am careful about finding fault with anyone saying there are no entities bigger than me. Personally I believe that faith, belief, make believe and opinions are all the same thing and arguments to the contrary are futile. Following the reasoning of "give a fool enough rope and he/she will eventually tie a noose and hang him/her self". We all have freedom to do just that. In the meantime those that refuse to grow up (i.e. - by practicing faith, belief, make believe and opinions) will be milked for all they have that is valuable because they cannot see that they cling to feeling safe which in no way is being safe. This is my first post to this group so I will stop here for now.
Nothing really much to add to everyone’s comments.
One of our founding fathers’ failures for fabulously fucking freedom — The 7 F’s which was the grade they got in Christian school—. was to make a clear separation of church and state. Until Reagan, it was always understood that this is what they wanted, but they didn’t do it in the language. “Congress shall make no law bahblah…”, which left the door somewhat wide open for ending church state separation.
How about: “freedom of worship is guaranteed for all people in the United States. No law may be passed privileging one religion over any other, or endorsing any religion, or providing public money to any religion, or allowing purely theological concerns to determine the civil law that governs the country.”
And that’s on my 1st cup of coffee.*
Instead, we got “Congress shall make no law blahblah.” to me, this is one of the primary goals if we ever get our country back and can reconsider the constitution. There must be a formal separation of church and state, both to keep the government with meddling from religion— the right wings favorite mantra— and to keep religion from meddling with the government, helping itself to the public feeding trough, forcing their purely theological issues into the lives of people who don’t share them.
* you knew that was going to show up. Don’t tell me you didn’t!
The First Amendment really needed to be three or four Amendments, honestly.
Several others needed a goodly bit of additional clarification (looking at 𝘺𝘰𝘶, Second and Ninth), but the First is a bunch of mini-Amendments wearing a trench coat, and all of the rights it was meant to protect are so much more vital than the bare-bones coverage they received.
I am so tired of these stories. It's like trying to plug a dam with fingers. I feel like the dam is eventually going to break. At this point, I feel that we should just start taxing the churches since they want to participate in our government so much. But no, they want to grab all the tax money and not pay into the system at all.
Most important takeaway: “ Riverstone Academy isn’t just violating church-state separation; it’s gambling with children’s education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.”. There is ZERO concern for the children. Entirely about dominating others. That’s evil
Evil and very intentional. They are looking to undercut competent secular education and insert their own twisted form of Christianity at the same time. The problem is that those of us who value the secular nature of the US and its government have become alerted to such actions, and we have this bad habit of calling them out when we see it!
That doesn't mean we're always successful in rooting efforts like these out, but that doesn't deter us from trying!
This is the sort of thing Conservative groups have started doing on a regular basis, especially under Trump: just ignore the law. Let someone file a lawsuit, and then see what happens. It's a petulant political movement that regards all laws as discriminatory and shifts the burden back to the legal system to enforce its rulings: just do it until the police come knocking.
Trump is calling for the execution of Democratic lawmakers for a video they put out reminding military personnel that they must not follow illegal orders.
So much for Freedom of Speech, I notice that all those Freedom of Speech absolutest are very quiet about that. Freedom of Speech absolutist=hypocrites!
When push comes to shove, these free-speech absolutists always remain silent when the speech belongs to someone they don't approve of. Well almost always anyway. We've had a very muted response from the free-speech people about limitations on free speech in the US and the UK for instance. Because in the UK case at least it's about Muslims.
That shuts it down at the state level. But when they go to the federal courts, they will try to push it through. I'm not sure they thought this through, though. Colorado and Oklahoma are both in the 10th circuit. Maybe they are hoping for a different 3 judges than the last time it made it there?
Fewer than half of all Americans now claim any kind of religious affiliation, but never the less right wing Christians continue to put their religion forward as the solution to all the world's problems. They do this in spite of the fact history does not begin to support their claims. Their obsession with indoctrinating children speaks directly to just how weak their belief system is. It is NEVER the job of our secular government to backstop Christianity or any other religion.
Fundamentalist Christians are running scared, and that is a large portion of the reason why we are increasingly seeing incidents like this which result in court cases, either civil or criminal. I don't anticipate a decrease in such cases, particularly so long as Donald Trump remains in office, and covertly encourages this kind of behavior.
They want the government to help them accomplish what they have failed to achieve from their pulpits.
And Trump is being OH-SO-HELPFUL with that crap! That man needs to be short-circuited, one way or another, before he utterly ruins this nation!
It began with Reagan when he and his handlers invited in the evangelicals with promises they never kept or intended to. What began as a short-term ploy to win an election came back to bite them as the preachers liked their little taste of power and hung around to largely co-opt the Republican party.
Reagan should be forever damned for aligning himself with Jerry Falwell and the not-so-Moral Majority. The whole State / Church thing was already compromised from reactionary efforts that came out of FDR's New Deal (again, I have to cite Keven Kruse's book, One Nation Under God), but Ronnie made things a WHOLE LOT WORSE.
According to this Politico article, the origin of the religious-right can be traced back to desegregation - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
Long after Trump is dead and gone the partisan judiciary will still remain.
No kidding. We need TERM LIMITS on the Supreme Court. We'll likely get them about the same time that pigs fly without benefit of Boeing, Airbus, or Cessna.
French Conseil Constitutionnel : 9 non permanent members. Every three years, 3 are replaced, 1 proposed by the President, 1 by the Senate president and 1 by Assemblée Nationale president for one 9 years tenure, and only one*. One exception, in case of a replacement, they can be nominated for a full 9 years terms but only if they served for less than 3 years.
* Since 2008, 3/5th of the Parliament is the quorum to refuse a nomination.
At least SOMEONE learned from our mistake.
Founded in 1958, soon after the proclamation of the 5th République (and the Constitution that goes with it).
And the staff will have to hose down the furniture after Vance leaves, and disinfect it too!
"Fewer than half of all Americans now claim any kind of religious affiliation"
Captain Cassidy is good at documenting the decline of Southern Baptist churches, here is her latest take - https://rolltodisbelieve.com/the-stories-hiding-in-southern-baptists-2025-annual-report/
"all Americans" In the land mass North and South America including the United States.
God Bless America?
More Dominionist Creep/Wak-a-Mole. They want these cases before SCOTUS so bad they can taste it. Theocracy is just one of their goals. Teaching kids not to ask difficult questions and how to short-circuit critical thinking skills is an even bigger goal.
“Riverstone Academy isn’t just violating church-state separation; it’s gambling with children’s education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.”
This is exactly what they want. They don’t want educated children, they don’t want public schools, they don’t even want the constitution. They want to be the only game in town, they want control over everything and they know the best way to get that is to keep the population ignorant. Their children will be educated, separately from the rabble, to be the elite. This is all been plainly expressed over and over since we started public education. Linda McMahon is working on destroying public schools at the federal level, these monsters are working at the local level, we’ve had school board after school board taken over by homeschooling parents from mega churches specifically so they can undermine the schools directly. State legislatures are gerrymandered and the repubelicans there are making laws designed to defund and kneecap the schools on the state level. Then there’s even the media’s involvement in tearing public education to shreds. Repeating lies about litter boxes and writing editorials about how teachers are the devils trying to convince your kids to rebel. It’s all orchestrated by theocrats trying to take over. They almost have what they want, total control. If they get it, I doubt it will last long, but the effects will be devastating for generations to come.
It's a travesty, but I'm unsure if the "legal suit motivation" is disqualifying or not. I guess we would have to look into the Pueblo district or Colorado state rules regarding starting a new school, but i could easily see how those rules didn't anticipate something like this and thus don't have anything in the books about how the board must consider motivational factors.
Hopefully both organizations have the latitude to axe this project without needing to cite a specific reason, just on a vote. But I worry that if ADF and their pet school team has dotted all the i's and crossed the t's on their school plan, then maybe the boards are obligated to treat them as they would any other applicant with the proper paperwork and planning done.
A long article on the extreme right in the US - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/20/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson
A Heritage staffer who said that if we allow these people into our organisation, "We look like clowns". Actually, you don't, what you look like is a bunch of fascists.
Fascist clowns? Let's go with that.
I prefer godddamm fucking brain dead, inbred fascist assholes! I like fascist clowns too, although that might be insulting clowns worldwide!
In this administration there is no look too clownish if you show sufficient loyalty. Thus we have a US Prosecutor with no prosecuting experience, a SecDef with no experience running large organizations and who uses social media to discuss ongoing military attacks with family members, and an FBI chief who declares they have a shooter in custody and there's nothing to worry about when the shooter is still at large.
All clowns welcome, so long as you're Trump's clown.
Trump prizes loyalty over any other qualifications, just like Putin wants loyalty rather than ability. If you have ability, expertise, etc., then you are a threat to the leadership (Putin/Trump).
Um, isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horses bolted? The Heritage Foundation are already fascist clowns. They wouldn’t exist if they weren’t.
The phrase, "public Christian School" should be considered an oxymoron as a matter of course. That it wasn't by the officials in Colorado considering this utter mistake is indicative of what Christian nationalists have been trying to do for entirely too long now: breakdown the wall of separation between church and state.
So, of course, this business is going to court. They'll waste time and taxpayer dollars arguing something that should have been intuitively obvious from the start. For the sake of the people of Colorado, let's hope the school is defeated.
Public Christian School is right up there with Christian Scientist as a contradiction in terms.
i agree with the contradiction in terms however I am careful about finding fault with anyone saying there are no entities bigger than me. Personally I believe that faith, belief, make believe and opinions are all the same thing and arguments to the contrary are futile. Following the reasoning of "give a fool enough rope and he/she will eventually tie a noose and hang him/her self". We all have freedom to do just that. In the meantime those that refuse to grow up (i.e. - by practicing faith, belief, make believe and opinions) will be milked for all they have that is valuable because they cannot see that they cling to feeling safe which in no way is being safe. This is my first post to this group so I will stop here for now.
Welcome!
Even the French christian schools that follow the official curriculum and the same rules as public schools don't dare to call themselves that.
Nothing really much to add to everyone’s comments.
One of our founding fathers’ failures for fabulously fucking freedom — The 7 F’s which was the grade they got in Christian school—. was to make a clear separation of church and state. Until Reagan, it was always understood that this is what they wanted, but they didn’t do it in the language. “Congress shall make no law bahblah…”, which left the door somewhat wide open for ending church state separation.
How about: “freedom of worship is guaranteed for all people in the United States. No law may be passed privileging one religion over any other, or endorsing any religion, or providing public money to any religion, or allowing purely theological concerns to determine the civil law that governs the country.”
And that’s on my 1st cup of coffee.*
Instead, we got “Congress shall make no law blahblah.” to me, this is one of the primary goals if we ever get our country back and can reconsider the constitution. There must be a formal separation of church and state, both to keep the government with meddling from religion— the right wings favorite mantra— and to keep religion from meddling with the government, helping itself to the public feeding trough, forcing their purely theological issues into the lives of people who don’t share them.
* you knew that was going to show up. Don’t tell me you didn’t!
The First Amendment really needed to be three or four Amendments, honestly.
Several others needed a goodly bit of additional clarification (looking at 𝘺𝘰𝘶, Second and Ninth), but the First is a bunch of mini-Amendments wearing a trench coat, and all of the rights it was meant to protect are so much more vital than the bare-bones coverage they received.
I think you are quite right about that. I hadn’t thought of it in that way before, but yes.
I am so tired of these stories. It's like trying to plug a dam with fingers. I feel like the dam is eventually going to break. At this point, I feel that we should just start taxing the churches since they want to participate in our government so much. But no, they want to grab all the tax money and not pay into the system at all.
They must know they are in the wrong, otherwise they wouldn't have been quite so coy about the whole thing.
I thought being deceitful was taboo for xtians. Both their deity and sacred book condemn it.
Rules for thee are not for me
LFJ is OK!
Most important takeaway: “ Riverstone Academy isn’t just violating church-state separation; it’s gambling with children’s education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.”. There is ZERO concern for the children. Entirely about dominating others. That’s evil
Evil and very intentional. They are looking to undercut competent secular education and insert their own twisted form of Christianity at the same time. The problem is that those of us who value the secular nature of the US and its government have become alerted to such actions, and we have this bad habit of calling them out when we see it!
That doesn't mean we're always successful in rooting efforts like these out, but that doesn't deter us from trying!
This is the sort of thing Conservative groups have started doing on a regular basis, especially under Trump: just ignore the law. Let someone file a lawsuit, and then see what happens. It's a petulant political movement that regards all laws as discriminatory and shifts the burden back to the legal system to enforce its rulings: just do it until the police come knocking.
Trump is calling for the execution of Democratic lawmakers for a video they put out reminding military personnel that they must not follow illegal orders.
All of the lawmakers is a veteran.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDyaKJCH774
So much for Freedom of Speech, I notice that all those Freedom of Speech absolutest are very quiet about that. Freedom of Speech absolutist=hypocrites!
Even freaking Charlie Kirk believed in Freedom of Speech.
When push comes to shove, these free-speech absolutists always remain silent when the speech belongs to someone they don't approve of. Well almost always anyway. We've had a very muted response from the free-speech people about limitations on free speech in the US and the UK for instance. Because in the UK case at least it's about Muslims.
I can't wait for that orange pig's obituary.
Every time he opens his fat gob, I want to say "Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!"
Hell, I want to kick him in the nuts ... though they might be difficult to find!
How about Drunken Pete Kegstand hitting himself in the nads?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJRiAxsFmlw
You would need an electron microscope to find something that is subatomic in size!
Well, his package is small enough for any size shoe to find it.
Well, don't worry. It's not like we will have public education in this country much longer.
https://assets.printerval.com/2023/03/09/6408e5fea6ff26.98442423.jpg
You must be MAD to post that.
He looks like a new man.
He had a hit record back in the day. I understand it was a real gas.
youtu.be/EOE2raqMjfQ
I had no idea.
I had this record and the issue it came in. Made of cardboard and worked like a charm.
This failed at the State Supreme Court level in Oklahoma. Let's hope Colorado strikes this down on constitutional grounds as well.
Some hope here. All 7 members of Colorado's Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats, which may give that court a liberal tilt.
That shuts it down at the state level. But when they go to the federal courts, they will try to push it through. I'm not sure they thought this through, though. Colorado and Oklahoma are both in the 10th circuit. Maybe they are hoping for a different 3 judges than the last time it made it there?
Given the intellectual damage they want to inflict on children, Christians prove yet again that they are child molesters.
Molesting both the physiology and the psychology. You don't get a whole lot more pernicious than that!
Oh great. More dimwit genocidaire...
Speak of the devil…
Those poor persecuted Christians openly pushing their religion on everyone yet again.
"Camel's nose in the tent" in both theory and practice.
They're not trying to get the camel's nose in. They're trying to shove the whole camel in one go.
Time to shoot the fucking camel dead!