53 Comments
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NOGODZ20's avatar

Christianity and education simply don't mix. They are polar opposites.

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Boreal's avatar

"a faith-based education' is, as my dad used to say, "as useful as teats on a boar".

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Guerillasurgeon's avatar

A religious education they used to say here. There's no such thing as a religious education, only religious instruction.

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Joan the Dork's avatar

Religion creeping into education is bad enough, but the fact that it's a proposal for a school that would be run by the Roman Catholic Church should be ringing... oh, roughly 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘴. A K-12 Catholic school is a one-stop shop for every creepo priest and penguin in the diocese, and the fact that someone- 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦- thought that it was a good idea to try to divert public funds to that proposal for a victim factory should cast more than a whiff of suspicion on the fuckwits who drafted it.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Why do Catholic Churches have bell towers? So you can’t hear the warning bells before it’s too late.

“When you are wearing rose colored glasses, red flags just look like flags.”

Princess Carolyn from Bojack Horseman.

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Troublesh00ter's avatar

I'm not sure there are enough ways to say how wrong this is, most particularly starting with the fact that it would be a Catholic school using public funds. I also want to say that the whole issue of choice in education and wanting alternatives is problematic at best. If the problem is a school system that under-performs, the cure should be more aimed at IMPROVING ITS PERFORMANCE, whether with better administration, better teachers, and [dare we say it] BETTER PAY, and NOT robbing the public pot to pay a different system, regardless if its religious based or not.

I would hope Oklahoma would rethink this ... but I doubt they will.

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Joan the Dork's avatar

Impossible- they didn't bother to think about it in the first place.

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cdbunch's avatar

The Catholic Church just opened a $50 *million* dollar shrine/church in Oklahoma City. Maybe they should have used some of that money for their "school" instead of trying to suck up Protestant (and Satanist) tax dollars.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Yet they'll continue to plead poverty. Especially when it comes to ponying up for their young victims and their families.

Sell off some properties, RCC. Despite your protests to the contrary, you're still obscenely wealthy. The biggest criminal organization in the world today.

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cdbunch's avatar

But raping kids isn't a crime in Vatican City (It's more of a sacrament), so they can't be a criminal organization.

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cdbunch's avatar

Speaking of which, if 6% of any other country's ambassadors were caught raping children, a UN "security" force would have paved it over within a year.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

And oldest.

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Len Koz's avatar

The Catholic church doesn't part with any money to support its own schools. Here in NY over the past couple of decades, private Catholic schools have had to close due to lack of funding. Not that it's a bad thing.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Taxpayer-funded $$$ for a Catholic charter school? What happened to praying to God/Jesus to get what they need?

You'd think Holy Mother Church didn't really believe in the power of prayer.

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Guerillasurgeon's avatar

They pray, the government gives them money. God works in mysterious but fairly predictable ways in these circumstances.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

They always seem to have their mouths on the government teat.

Franklin was right when he observed that bad religions fail to support themselves.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Mandatory:

"Religion poisons everything."

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Oklahoma is already ranked 42nd in Education. Just think much worse it's going to get in a bible belt state if Catholics get their grubby hands on children's minds.

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Matri's avatar

Letting them get their hands on children's anything is bad.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Let the lawsuits by the FFRF, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, ACLU, etc. fly! Not one red cent towards the promotion of religion on the public dime.

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oraxx's avatar

No religious school, Catholic or otherwise, should get one cent of public money, for any reason, EVER! The real goal here is killing public education so children can be herded into right-wing Christian schools and indoctrinated. There was a time when the courts would have struck this down in a heartbeat, but that was before our new and improved Christo-fascist Supreme Court took over.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Stop stealing money from the taxpayers for your grift.

“Earlier this year, Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, refused to address any of those concerns. He said that those were all hypothetical situations that he couldn’t speak to since there were no actual cases in front of him… even though Catholic doctrine has no problem addressing hypothetical sins.“

He knows exactly how these issues will play out and he knows damn well that it will be unconstitutional, but once he’s got his little church school going it will be too difficult for the state to pull out. So he obfuscates, he hems and haws, he prattles on about hypotheticals that are guaranteed to happen because he’s trying to get into public school territory without the public school responsibility.

Those issues were not hypotheticals, they are realities that need an answer.

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Kathryn's avatar

The Southern Baptist Convention owns OK lock stock and barrel. Protestants hate Catholics. It's kinda the entire point of Protestantism.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

“The proposed K-12 school says it would help Catholics in rural parts of Oklahoma obtain a faith-based education.“

This is not the purpose of the public education system. This is not the responsibility of the state to manage. This is not what religious freedom is.

Public education’s purpose os to educate all citizens, to focus on one religion in that education (even in just one school) is to exclude certain citizens from an education. The state should not be in the business of providing religious anything to anyone, religious freedom demands the state be neutral, not providing finances and targets for proselytizing. Current SCROTUS notwithstanding. If the state can create a religious school then the state can interfere in how the school operates. But we know damn well the screeching they will do if that were to happen. Well, to them not any other religion in the country.

This school is a bad idea and as mentioned above, if the church was truly interested in providing a catholic education to more children, they’d pay for it themselves with the blood money they got from stealing from the Jewish people in the Holocaust and crusades and every other atrocity they managed to execute.

Damn we really need to destroy the Republican Party, tear it completely down and throw the majority of the Republican politicians in prison for their treasonous acts.

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Joe King's avatar

It being Oklahoma, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them objected because they don't think Catholics are Christians.

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ericc's avatar

I would bet that is exactly what it is. There is nothing like a test case that goes against majority intention to help them enforce "neutral" laws. It's when the speech/practice/request lines up with what the majority wants, that you have to really watch out for shenanigans.

Though the school's in-your-face rejection of handicap accessible requirements would seem to make this an easy call, even without the religious component.

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NoOne of Consequence's avatar

The problem is that it was a 'virtual Catholic school'. It needed to be a real, hardcore, Catholic school, none of this Vatican II and 'who am I to judge' nonsense!

...

uh, snark?

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Okay, y’all know how much I hate vouchers, it’s like demanding your town pay your Club dues from the parks budget. Charter schools are no different. In some ways they can be worse, generally run by corporations for profit they choose which students they enroll, they don’t have a great deal of oversight regarding standards and training, and if they don’t feel like they’re making enough profit they shut down just like that, leaving students hanging in the middle of the year with no school to attend. Some folks argue that they have adaptive curricula, however they tend to be untested and less than successful for a wide range of students. Then they divert money away from the public schools.

If students need more adaptive learning methods, provide the public schools in the area with the means to develop them, like funding and training resources.

Every time a school referendum comes up, the folks arguing against them say shit like “throwing money at the schools isn’t going to solve the problems.” In my experience, throwing money at the schools solves a great deal of the problems in the schools since the problems tend to be that they are underfunded. Why are there kids failing grades? Because there aren’t enough teachers to give the students the attention they need, money pays for more teachers. Why are there gangs in the schools? Because the school doesn’t have robust after school programs to keep kids busy and out of trouble while their parents are working 20 hours a day, money pays for after school activities. Kids are underperforming? School lunches and other meal offerings help kids to learn by providing for basic needs, money pays for lunch programs. Or maybe the kids underperform because they don’t have the supplies they need to accomplish their tasks, money pays for books and calculators and pencils and whiteboards and computers and projectors and paper and on and on.

Charter schools are really just the first iteration of privatizing public schools like they are privatizing prisons. The idea is to wean us off public education, make it all private, price it out of the majority’s reach, and then only the elite will be educated and the rest of us mindless drones working on survival mode.

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ericc's avatar

I agree. Though I am much less concerned about the slippery slope, given they've been around for 30 years now with little to no change in how the systems are run. It's crappy, the money should go to the public school system, but it's the same crappy state revenue diversion it was in the '90s.

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