And now, from the tortured and twisted logic department, comes this little tidbit from an activist opposed to vouchers being used to send D.C. students to private schools.
Last week, about 100 supporters of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program held a rally outside the U.S. Department of Education headquarters.
According to news reports, about 200 students were awarded vouchers this past spring. Then our federal government double crossed the kiddies and yanked the vouchers.
The voucher program gives parents who are unable to afford to send their children to private schools the same choice the ones who can do, and that’s why Robert Vinson Brannum, the activist in question, opposes vouchers.
“Not every choice can come on a public dollar,” Brannum said in one news report. “I should have to pay for my child to go to private school. If it’s acceptable for those who oppose abortion not to have their dollars used to pay for abortions, I should have that same choice.”
And, by comparing the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions to the use of taxpayer money to send a kid to private school, Brannum wins the twisted, tortured logic award for 2009. His reasoning is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin to pick his argument apart, but I’ll start with this one.
Government doesn’t compel anyone to have sex. Government doesn’t compel women to get pregnant, either.
Having sex is strictly a private matter, one that should be the most private. In fact, when the so-called “pro-choice” crowd supported Norma McCorvey – the Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade – in her case that went to the Supreme Court, they used the “right to privacy” argument.
They went rooting around in the “penumbra” of the Constitution and just yanked the right out. The “right to privacy” is the ball field the “pro-choicers” chose to play on.
Later, they decided that they didn’t really mean a “right to privacy” at all, but the right to an abortion at any stage of a woman’s pregnancy.
And they insisted that poor women should have the same right as rich women, and advocated for public funds be made available for abortions for poor women.
Realizing that they were asking the public to foot the bill for the consequences of a very private act, the pro-choicers completely abandoned their “right to privacy” language. These days they say “a woman’s right to choose.”
Realizing that they were asking the public to foot the bill for the consequences of a very private act, the pro-choicers completely abandoned their “right to privacy” language. These days they say “a woman’s right to choose.”
Public education isn’t even a different pew in the same church. Heck, it’s an entirely different religion. Government makes education compulsory for children up to a certain age. That means those parents who don’t have the money to send their children to private school or the time to home school them have to send them to public schools.
Once the government has compelled parents to send their children to public schools, it has entered into a contract with those parents.
Government has promised not only to educate children, but also to do so in a safe environment. If the school either provides little to no education or isn’t safe, or both, then the government has reneged on its promise.
At that point, parents have the right to demand that government provide them with an alternative. I’ve gone so far as to say those parents have the right to demand the government cut them a check for whatever the per-pupil expenditure is in their district for public education.
With that check they should be able to pick between another public school, a charter school, a private school or even a parochial school.
I developed my refund philosophy some years ago, after I learned one Baltimore public high school was so bad that it had a section called “The Level of Death,” where the hoodlums smoked pot and played craps and where no serious student or even faculty member dared to venture.
Why, I asked myself, are taxpayers required to even fund a public school with a “Level of Death”? What kind of education could possibly go on at the school?
Why, none, of course. Maryland taxpayers, I concluded, would be perfectly justified in demanding a refund of any tax money that went to fund “Level of Death” High.
Vouchers aren’t about choice. They’re about government refunding our tax dollars misused for public education.
