Jody Hice, Asshole of the Day for September 18, 2014
I'm so sick of people who think that school prayer is OK. No matter how you phrase it, it still comes down to a public school forcing kids to pray, and a prayer they and their parents may not believe in and might even object to. And don't tell me that the kid can just not say it, that it's somehow optional, because we're talking about schoolchildren who will pick up on the fact that one kid is different and then just pester them to death over it. Not all kids, but there's always some.
And I would add that if you think school prayer is OK, then you really don't think that people who have a different religion from you deserve full citizenship. Because you won't have the school force kids to recite a Jewish or Muslim prayer, only a Christian prayer. And you're asking the state to privilege your religion above others. That is wrong in a country where we don't have an official religion, and where the Founding Fathers went to such lengths to codify that we don't.
But then there's people who not only want school prayer brought back, but also blame all society's problems on the fact that we outlawed it. Two years ago it was Mike Huckabee saying that Newtown happened because we no longer had school prayer. And now we have Jody Hice, running for Congress in Georgia, blaming gangs and teen pregnancy on the lack of prayer in schools:
Removing prayer, then removing the Bible, then removing religious documents such as the Ten Commandments, which of course has led to the removal of other symbols and so forth, and then removal of benedictions and invocations at any kind of school event or activity.
And I just want to ask you, what kind of behavior, as we have removed prayer and Bible and our Christian heritage from our public school, what has been the counter consequence? Has behavior increased or decreased? …Have we become a better place to live or a worse place to live? Is there more drugs or less? More gang violence or less? More teenage pregnancy or less? …What has happened in our society as we have removed our religious heritage from being taught, from even being allowed in our public schools?
Folks, across the board we have suffered. Education scores have gone down, violence and crime has gone up and we are witnessing more and more of the consequence of those decisions.
It's a pretty chilling story. I mean if everything is as he says, if society really is suffering in all these ways, maybe we should consider switching to a theocracy, right?
But of course his whole story is wrong, because as Right Wing Watch points out:
In fact, teen pregnancy rates have been falling steadily over the past two decades as has the rate of sexual activity among teens, and in 2011 violent crime in the U.S. fell to the lowest rate in 40 years, a trend that has persisted. But somehow we don’t think Hice meant to credit the separation of church and state for these positive trends.
So he's wrong on every single thing he blames on a lack of school prayer. But it doesn't matter, because he didn't set out to do a careful study of the evidence to come to this conclusion. He decided these things sounded right, played on the fears and prejudices of his radio audience and voting base, and then attributed it to something they want-- the state enforcement of their religion on other people's children. And for that, he is the Asshole of the Day.
It is Jody Hice's first time as Asshole of the Day.
Full story: Right Wing Watch.