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March 9, 2004

Indoctrinating the Young and Impressionable

by Red Wolf

United States: Every wondered how so many insane, brainwashed fundies end up in US politics? Ever thought that there must be some farm where the terminally spineless were moulded into Pat Robertson clones? Turns out there is — the evil, little bastards are churned out of a specialist Hitler Youth style college controlled by evangelical wingnuts.

As one of 12 siblings taught at home by their parents in St. Croix Falls, Wis., Abram Olmstead knew he would fit right in at Patrick Henry College, the first college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers. But what really sold him was the school's pipeline into conservative politics.

Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this semester, 7 are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in the four-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. An eighth intern works for the president's re-election campaign. A former Patrick Henry intern now works on the paid staff of the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove. Over the last four years, 22 conservative members of Congress have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns in their offices or on their campaigns, according to the school's records...
...The college's knack for political job placement testifies to the increasing influence that Christian home-schooling families are building within the conservative movement. Only about half a million families around the country home-school their children and only about two-thirds identify themselves as evangelical Christians, home-schooling advocates say. But they have passionate political views, a close-knit grass-roots network and the financial support of a handful of wealthy patrons. For all those reasons, home-schoolers have captured the attention of a wide swath of conservative politicians, many of whom are eager to hire Patrick Henry students.

When President Bush signed legislation last fall banning the procedure it calls partial-birth abortion, Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and the president of Patrick Henry, was one of just five prominent Christian conservatives invited to the Oval Office for the occasion.

Patrick Henry College is the centerpiece of an effort to extend the home-schooling movement's influence beyond education to a broad range of conservative Christian issues like opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and obscenity in the media. The legal defense association, located on the Patrick Henry campus, established the college as a forward base camp in the culture war, with the stated goal of training home-schooled Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values.

We are not home-schooling our kids just so they can read, Mr. Farris said. The most common thing I hear is parents telling me they want their kids to be on the Supreme Court. And if we put enough kids in the farm system, some may get to the major leagues...

...Mike Farris is trying to train young people to get on a very right-wing political agenda, said Nancy Keenan, the education policy director at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, and a former Montana state superintendent of public education. The number of Patrick Henry interns in the White House scares me to death, she said. It tells us a little bit more about the White House than it does about the kids.

College for the Home-Schooled Is Shaping Leaders for the Right [BugMeNot]—New York Times, 8th March 2004.

Posted in Church and State at 05:46. Last modified on July 14 2009 at 16:45.
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