This is what Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson and his fellow religious nuts don’t understand about mixing government and religion. You start with prayers at the school board meetings, and you end with a high school teacher telling his students to believe his way or risk going to hell:
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.
“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”
The student, Matthew LaClair, said that he felt uncomfortable with Mr. Paszkiewicz’s statements in the first week, and taped eight classes starting Sept. 13 out of fear that officials would not believe the teacher had made the comments.
...
In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.
That’s what “religious freedom” means to the wingnuts: freedom to proselytize schoolkids, and freedom to make death threats against anyone who points out how wrong it is to do that.
Go post a message of support for Matt LaClair. He’s not out of high school yet, but he understands the US Constitution far better than many of his elders.
Hat tip: PZ Myers
No comments
Comments feed for this article