Just a few light things on this somber day.
Good assortment of Good Friday quotes (from last year's TDE Good Friday post).
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Marie: "Today is a fast day, kids."
Michael (2nd grade): "Does that mean we can't eat fast food?"
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The leader of Scotland's Green Party, Robin Harper, has called for the abolition of Catholic schools.
"State education should be secular," Harper said, promising that the Green Party would work to end government support for the parochial schools.
The existence of separate religious schools "tends to divide communities," Harper said. He argued that Catholics should receive their religious instruction through their parents and pastors, so that religious education in schools is unnecessary.
The existence of religious schools "tend to divide communities." Thanks for that cutting-edge eighteenth-century sentiment. I don't know what alternative the Green Scots have in mind, but do they think the existence of one public school in each district eliminates discord? That's hardly the case. Much of America's strife takes place at the public schools. It's not because they're public schools, but because there's only one public school in each district, meaning that the battle--God or no God, gay is good or gay is not good, textbook A or textbook B, Creationism or Evolutionism, this t-shirt bad or this t-shirt good--must be fought there and won there. There is no alternative. Quite frankly, at least in the U.S., parochial school alternatives help relieve some of the pressure that comes from a near-monopoly situation. If parents have a different choice, they won't feel the need to dig in at the school board meetings and courts to defend their educational preferences. They can simply walk out the door.
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More on the Balthasar tarot stuff. My earlier post.
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"Statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer." Murray Rothbard. And also of Democratically-elected despots (via Rockwell):
Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
