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Standing For Life
The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Bush Administration will announce new regulations Friday expanding the “right of conscience” protections for health care providers so that hospitals, doctors, nurses and other workers cannot be forced to participate in abortions or other practices that may violate their religious beliefs. We believe conscience clause protections are extraordinarily important. Whether it’s a Catholic hospital or an evangelical doctor, no one should be forced to participate in a practice they find morally reprehensible.
Regrettably, however, the Journal also reports that the Obama transition team is already laying out plans to repeal these new rules and force taxpayers to pay for abortions.
Educating Or Indoctrinating?
If you thought segregation in education was a thing of the past, think again. Barack Obama’s announced nominee for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who currently heads Chicago’s public school system, was promoting segregation in the schools as recently as October. But in this case, Duncan’s issue wasn’t race but sexual orientation. At an October press conference announcing 20 new schools, Duncan unveiled plans for Chicago’s first “gay, lesbian and transgender” high school. The so-called “School for Social Justice Pride Campus” would “seek to foster a violence-free atmosphere for students who are often targeted for their sexual identities.” Shouldn’t all schools have “violence-free atmospheres”?
According to the Chicago Tribune, Duncan hailed the “gay high school” concept, saying that he expected “half of its students would be gay while the other half would be straight students with an interest in the social justice focus school officials want to foster.” When I served as Under Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, we did our best to keep the focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. But today our kids leave high school knowing precious little about our nation’s founding principles, basic grammar, math and science, and way too much about “social justice” and radical environmentalism.
Education has given way to indoctrination. And the fact that the head of the Chicago Public School system would be championing the cause of “sexual identity segregation” in the public schools is a sad testimony to the radicalization of education in America today and the agenda of the incoming administration. If Duncan was pushing the creation of homosexual high schools in Chicago, what will his agenda be in Washington?