The Fatally Wrong Way to Defend Secular Public Schools

Tri-County Freethinkers, you're doing it wrong.

Parents in Casey County, Kentucky reportedly pulled their children from school after an atheist group was allowed to distribute literature at three local schools, the Danville Advocate-Messenger reported.

“Our attendance was probably not as good as it normally is,” Liberty Elementary Principal Boyd Harris was quoted as saying. “We feel like there may be some connection there.”

The books were delivered by the Tri-County Freethinkers on March 28, after the group successfully petitioned county officials for the right to distribute their material in a manner similar to a Christian group, the Gideons.

However, the Advocate-Messenger reported that a group of local parents entered Jones Park Elementary demanding to see where copies of the Freethinkers’ book, Humanism, What’s That?: A Book for Curious Kids would be displayed. Some parents and children also reportedly followed group members Torey Glassmeyer and Jim G. Helton as they delivered the books.

“We’re here to defend God and his glory,” one anonymous woman was quoted as saying.

Helton told the Advocate-Messenger that he was not surprised by the heightened scrutiny from residents, saying it has also led others to come to them anonymously out of fear of reprisal.

“With the Gideons it’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” He was quoted as saying. “They come in and they get shut down. It will be interesting to see what the school’s response will be next year. When people complained about the Gideons coming in, they blew it off.”

Tri-County Freethinkers, I'm going to tell you some things that I'm sure you already know, but that you are pretending to have forgotten in the hopes of earning some free media.

Which I am giving you (a tiny bit) in hopes of preventing other Kentucky Freethinkers from making your mistakes.

First, the fastest, most effective and most permanent way to create Freethinkers, particularly the atheist variety, is to saturate their spongy little child minds in bibble. Bibble morning, bibble noon, bibble night. Make the little fuckers memorize it. When they ask questions, spare not the rod but demand silence and unquestioning obedience.

By puberty, they're Atheist Warriors for Life.

Second: stooping to the level of the Gideons? Really? These are people who think that the hidden existence of a book of Bronze Age mythology in a closed drawer is going to stop people from fucking. People who came to that room for the sole and specific purpose of fucking and who have no reason to open that drawer or remove a book of myths from it and start reading. While they're fucking.

Dust bunnies are smarter than Gideons.

Third, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one prohibiting Congress from  establishing a state religion, the one that in combination with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment bars government employees - like, you know, school teachers - from lending government endorsement to any religion. Unfortunately, it does not prevent any random third party from dumping piles of its propaganda on already overburdened public institutions.

But when you demand equal time for freethought, you accomplish two fatally stupid mistakes:

• You lend support to the motherfuckers who deride and undermine freethought by insisting that atheism, secularism, humanism and science are religions, and 
• You condone the false concept that religion belongs in any public institution outside of museums and classes teaching "Causes of Human Misery."

Stop playing the game by freakazoid rules, Tri-County Freethinkers. Stop lending them credibility. Publicize what the freakazoids are doing, then point and laugh.  Because that's what works.

Ridicule.