POLITICS AND RELIGION ALERT
I am a globalist, a more-than-somewhat Libertarian capitalist, a practical feminist, and a Christian (though not a fundamentalist). Updated 7-6-2002
I get very impatient with the people who oppose movements like the European Union on the grounds that such a "New World Order" will provoke the Apocalypse. What's the matter -- are they afraid they will get hauled off the Wrong Way? (Besides, wouldn't that solve the whole situation?) I have more respect for those who say "I'm just not comfortable federating with the country next door. We still do things too differently"
I think school vouchers should at least be tried out in a few markets, to see if they even work. To those who are afraid that their personal tax money would get spent at a school based in a religion they don't approve of, I say "So put your muscle where your mouth is." Go find a church school you do approve of, and get with the school board to see where they can use some volunteer expertise. (I never met a school board yet who couldn't use some expert volunteers somewhere in the system.) Besides, if you have kids of your own in school, you will get back more in vouchers than you put in in property taxes, if Little Rock is anyway typical of the ratio.
I am in favor of a national-standard exit exam for high school graduation. The job market is national (hell - it's global, going-by how many quasi-legal resident non-citizens are scrambling for green cards this year) and so is the list of college-options. If we want to stay competitive as a nation, we need to be sure all our graduates are ready for their next step, be it entering Friendly Neighborhood Vo-Tech for auto-mechanics training, typing want-ads for the newspaper in the State capitol, enlisting in the Armed Forces, or applying to the college or univerisity of their choice (be it Vine Covered U, Enormous State U, or Charlie Tuna Scientific Institute). The entrance/proficiency minimums of all these need to feed into the test composition, to-where if a student passes the test in (for instance) English, they need have no fear of being required to take Grammar Zero wherever their next educational stop may be.
I have heard very little good about "bilingual education". The point of going to school is to become functional in the society. This means fluency in English. At the same time, since there are more students (of all ages) than ever before who were not born in an English-speaking culture, fluency in the appropriate non-English languages for the particular community should be a bonusable skill for teachers.
This goes double for government workers. That news story of the welfare worker in Arizona who was fired for "violating" the state's English-Only rule by speaking Spanish to an elderly client really spiked my blood pressure. There are 200+ years of various governmental records in English in most of this country, which is reason-enough (for me) to retain English as the language of Records. But government workers DO need to be able to translate for the newly-arrived or the too-old-for-ease-of-learning.
I have in mind the Marksmanship Bonus, which the Army and Marines (at least used to) pay, as the model for such an incentive-pay.
The current flap about separation of church and state simply confuses me. Keeping in-mind what a hell English politics had been all through the Colonial period as a result of the Catholic-Protestant differences, I can see where the drafters of the Constitution were coming from in not wanting to specify a religion that was required of all governmental participants. Where I have problems with is the interpretation that says that government support can't be offered equally to all religious organizations right alongside secular organizations doing the same work. A panelist on a recent NPR talk show tried to explain that the underpinnings of that opinion go all the way back to James Madison. I wish someone would direct my attention to an explanation (in non-lawyerese) of his train of logic. I was very gratified with the recent court decision which agreed with me that if all the religions get an equal shot at the voucher money, it does not constitute establishing any of them.
