Apolitical Staples

Dion is not a leader__Liberals hide their crap in their mouths…LIBERALS BAD everyone else good.

I can’t see why the anti-Creationists are causing such a big deal. I’m an adult B.Sc. holder who was raised in a religious household…I have my own questions (no, you don’t know what the questiosn are). Many of those questions I haven’t received or resolved answers for yet. I have regular discussions with my teenage son about those same questions. At least he asks them because he’s been exposed to all (as we know them) explanations of life on earth. I pity the poor students of government schools who have been told the “truth”. If the creation story is such bunk why are the anti-creationists so afraid of telling questioning, cynical, anti-establishment teenagers about it? If anyone can, a teenager can see through BS better than adults can. I trust them for that. Fer chrissakes, I was a teenager some time ago. Does the creation story have such a power that some are afraid of it? As has been said, ‘me thinks thou dost protest too much’. Pedro

So the typically secular liberal media falls in line with the Liberal defence of the status quo on the faith-based funding issue. Was there anybody out there who didn’t see this coming? Raise your hands. Anyone? Anyone at all?

C’mon, this was McGuinty’s ace in the hole the entire time. Who needs defence when the biased refs keep you on the power-play the entire game?

Stand by for some CBC yahoo to yell out, “JOHN TORY, DO YOU LOVE THIS PROVINCE?”

Q:Was there anybody out there who didn’t see this coming? Raise your hands. Anyone? Anyone at all?

A: John Tory

I’m sure he saw it, Greg. But he’s gotta light a fire under this campaign. His stance on the issue is a winner. It was there for the any challenger for the premiership from any party to take in any past election campaign. It is not an issue about right and left, it’s about right and wrong. McGuinty even mused about it in opposition but never followed through. Maybe he should have in his first election…he certainly didn’t need to go there in 2003.

Defence of the status quo only works if you argue that it’s pragmatic not to upset the apple-cart in our education system. But McGuinty’s completely wasted that opportunity with all his silly patronizing. Fortunately for him, he’s managed to knot this thing up in some silly creationism side-show but that will pass. The conservatives have to anticipate these campaign tactics better. Liberal and secular media cheerleaders can only turn a blind eye to McGuinty’s hypocrisy so long as Tory provides cover for them by fumbling the issue. And that’s what Tory failed to anticipate.

“The conservatives have to anticipate these campaign tactics better.”

Yes they have to, they surely can’t get worse. But there I go, underestimating John Tory again.

Tory tried to out-Liberal the Liberals by pandering to minorities and it blew up in his face. Not a good sign for someone wishing to be Premier. Either that or he really believes creationist nonsense, in which case, its not a good sign for someone wishing to be Premier.

You know a good solution, right? Public funds to public schools only. No public funding for Catholics, Jews, Pastafarains or any other religion. If you want you children to be educated with religion, you send them to private religious schools and then opt out of paying education taxes. Let those schools compete and see whose grads get the jobs - I’m guessing there will not be too many doctors accepted from schools that think evolution is false and don’t teach it in biology. Eventually they will disappear or change to accept the facts. Kind of evolution of the education system….

But of course, no one is offering that sensible and fair position so I won’t be voting…

“You know a good solution, right? Public funds to public schools only. No public funding for Catholics, Jews, Pastafarains or any other religion. If you want you children to be educated with religion, you send them to private religious schools and then opt out of paying education taxes.” Don’t I wish that were actually on the table.

I think it is on the table. Arn’t the Greens advocating no public funding for “religious” schools teaching the Ontario curriculum, including Catholic schools? I don’t they are advocating any opting out of provincial taxes, however. So for minorities, you pay for your own kids’ education and for the other people’s kids too, including the kids in the Catholic “separate” school system.

Having thus been conditioned to treat every mention of Christian faith as an explosive blunder, the media are now giving John Tory the same treatment — notwithstanding the reasonableness of what the man actually said.

Sure the media are jackasses. And Tory’s proposal is quite reasonable, given the prevailing intellectual and moral premises. Once you decide that people must be separated from the money that they earned before any decision can be made about the upbringing of their children, then how can you say that any method of redistributing the money that the politicians come up with is unreasonable?

One the one hand, the Gimper’s and the mediacracy’s viewpoint is quite valid. Given that ordinary people are dangerous idiots - they must be or else it wouldn’t make any sense to take so much money away from them in the name of raising their children - it stands to reason that the wise, selfless political hacks and pointy-headed bureaucrats should be free to concentrate all of the money (I mean, all of what’s left of the money after they give themselves and their friends a very generous cut) on what they consider to be the very best, standardized education system. Hosing the money around on multiple school systems would be inefficient, and allowing people “choice” of where the money is spent contradicts the established fact that people are too stupid to know what their children need. For example, many people are so stupid that they think that as adults their children will never have to work for, partner with, or sell anything to anyone from outside of their ethnic group, therefore if left to their own devices people would raise their children to be unilingual, ethnic bigots who are incapable of respecting anyone else’s opinions, property, or freedom. The farsighted Gimper has quite reasonably decided that no one should be trusted with the power to make such an terrifying decision. (Yes, it sounds odd, but apparently parents can actually earn their money by cooperating in the larger society, yet remain so ignorant of the cooperation with which they earned their money, that they would actually neglect to teach their children to cooperate with others.)

But Tory takes a different angle, which is no more unreasonable than the Gimper’s (given that they already have your money, and that desisting from taking it from you is not on the table). Tory thinks that people are not quite as completely stupid and reckless as do his opponents. He trusts them - a little bit. He will let them choose which type of school gets their own money. But Tory knows that people are still pretty idiotic and untrustworthy, so of course it will still be necessary to take their money away from them first, pass it through the hands of the enormous, centralized bureaucracy, plus a new, extra bureaucracy which will enforce “standards”, and he will also ensure that all teachers are “qualified” (trained at government teachers’ schools, unionized and overpaid).

So you see, both positions are very reasonable. Are people 100% stupid with regard to their children’s education, or only 95% stupid? What is the best way for government to expand? Should it extend all its tentacles from a central, monolithic hub, or can it raise people’s children more effectively by extending control from multiple, distributed hubs? That’s what the press has failed to appreciate - that this election is all about choice. The people will decide how they shall be enslaved.

He lit a fire under his campaign alright. What is it about conservatives and the stone age anyway?

Mike,

Your chicken little scenario is about as patronizing as the current Liberal posture. It is also insulting to millions of practising people of faith (of which I am not one) - many of whom who’ve moved beyond the obvious myths in their respective good books but have retained the ripened fruit from which our productive and flourishing society owes a great deal.

How it has escaped your powers of observation that our functioning society is replete with good productive professional people who retain a faith in god. They are not frightened by the notion of Adam and Eve nor by the theory of evolution as each has obviously made its own inimitable contribution to modern society.

That you choose to frame the debate in so cynical terms is, frankly, depressing. The core issue in this debate is one of fairness. If Bob Rae, David Peterson, or Dalton McGuinty had chosen to fight this battle on the side of fairness (as Tory is), I would have had no alternative but to support them on this cause. As I said before, it is not a matter of right and left. The notion of eliminating funding in the Catholic school system is essentiially tantamount to dismantaling what has really become a significant portion of the public school system. It is just not going to happen. The only democratic alternative is what Tory is proposing.