FlaSoxxJim

You are correct in that I think we should address the kids getting their asses kicked for being different before we make the rare (though incorrect IMO) cases of suppressed freedom of religious expression (through what is worn or carried under one's arm) a federal case. PA, I'm not sure how after we've been up and down this you can openly suggest I'm looking to suppress religious viewpoints. I defend as vehemently as anyone the right to practice any religion you care to as long as it does not impact those around you who don't want to be bothered. Yes, that means I am against mandating a formal period of time set aside in public schools to pray/reflect/etc. As for the rest, let me reiterate" "I have no problem whatsoever with kids carrying bibles wherever they want to or wearing crucifixes, Star of Davids, ankhs, whatever. And let anyone who wants to get together before or after formal school hours and pray the rosary, worship a head of lettuce, or whatever else their faith compels them to do. Just not during the precious few hours of formal class time that make up the school day." You also do me a grave injustice by insinuating I'm out to prove the non-existence of the Big Man on the Cloud, as I am not. His existence/non-existence is simply not a professional concern of mine as a scientist. It doesn't matter one way or the other, though like everyone I have my own personal beliefs on the matter. Similarrly, I am not trying to humuliate anyone with faith. I only I just find it funny when people of faith who, by definition, don't require proof in order to follow a spiritual path try to come up with some sort of proof validating their choice to follow that path. Proof and the search for it, is the realm of the scientist. Faith - and the feeling of it and the following of it - is the realm of the believer who neither requires proof nor is qualified to suggest that they possess any. Ne'er the twain shall meet (unless it's at Denny's over a breakfast skillet). I nonetheless appreciate your allowing me to "like the dong." I can only assume you mean Long Duk Dong from "16 Candles" fame, right?

You have to know that is not what I am saying. I have no problem whatsoever with kids carrying bibles wherever they want to or wearing crucifixes, Star of Davids, ankhs, whatever. And let anyone who wants to get together before or after formal school hours and pray the rosary, worship a head of lettuce, or whatever else their faith compels them to do. Just not during the precious few hours of formal class time that make up the school day. I'm saying that for the few very rare instances where students have been rebuked for simply carrying a Bible or wearing affectations of their faith, there are COUNTLESS (I know how you LOVE the caps...) cases where gay/suspected gay students are made the victims of prejudice, persecuted, physically/mentally/verbally abused, etc. For you to consider the outlier cases of suppressed religious suppression to be outrageous and actionable offenses while at the same time the growing number of incidents in which kids are put through hell for being different doesn't register as something requiring attention is troubling. Is it not? Equally troubling is your inability to keep away from personal attacks in your posts. Without bothering to reread, I've been called "clueless" and my posts have been declared stupid. You have been done the same with other posters in these recent threads. How about keeping to the topics at hand and refraining from the descent into personal attack?

If 'participation' boils down to viewership that has the potential to see the advertising, then yeah that probably explains the discrepancy.

I also thought the Alpine music track on the southsider trek up into the UD was pretty witty, while everything else is way tired and patently untrue stereotype. OK, maybe not the attendence thing but whatever... I think Cheat has some intermediate Flash skills, and my Flash programming skills are rudimentary at best. Doesn't mean I won't give it a whack, and maybe have something together before the Sox/Cubs games in a little more than a month. Maybe. I think my version would concentrate on one or two Neanderthal and drunken fratboy bleacher BUMS as they watch a game. Spilling beer on everyone..., unphased while their team gets pounded but acting like giddy morons when SamME hits a dinger..., comparing ticket prices to see who got raped worse by the Cubs ticket scalping office down the street..., throwing back fake opponents HR balls like complete Flubs fans, etc... I think I'd also have those unsightly WEEDS on the walls coming alive like something out of Little Shop of Horrors and attacking random Flub fans... Wow, this could be fun. There's so much that could be done and this is just scratching the surface (Flub fans are such easy targets) - it would almost have to be an anthology. Destined to take the place of StrongBad?? What do you think? Legal Department: any and all scenarios described above, real or imagined, are the sole intellectual property of FlaxxCo. and its parent company Flaxxtopia Ltd. Portrayal of any of the above situations in any medium, including but not limited to: visual, audio, olfactory, or hallucinatory, without the express writtten consent of my Aunt Edna dead these ten long years IS FORBIDDEN. So there.

He's gotten the last two saves only because he had a couple-run cushion, but I agree that it's important to see he acknowledges there is a problem and will presumably work taht much harder to step it up a notch.

And it was on Earth Day to boot!

But that way nobody can witness your self-righteous silent petition, to your Lord and Savior and you would be forced to (*gulp*) have to actually keep it between you and your God. That takes a lot of the fun out of it for the holier-than-thou/better-than-you crowd trying so desparately to 'fix' maybe the one thing in teh public school system that ain't broken.

Aye, there's the rub. There isn't a better option in-house right now. But, I'll tell you the tapestry of profanities I weaved between Monday's 9th inning and tonight's regarding Koch's ineptitide frightened the wife and neighbors. My wife knows when Billy comes on just by hearing me swearing at the television from the other room. Tonight she matter-of-factly said, "Doesn't the manager get that he's just plain bad?" I had no response, of course.

'Go in that direction' where? In the confines of a class supposedly about ethics and supposedly 'not associated with prayer'? Students are encouraged to pray until their blue in the soul, but they can do it outside of that class, right? Honestly, even with the reasonable argument that private, faith-affiliated education is out of the price range for many families who would like it for their kids, how does that keep these families from pursuing religious grounding through church, Sunday school, catechism, church youth groups, family prayer, Bible Camp, community prayer groups, friggin' VeggieTales, etc...?? With all of these opportinities where willing Christians teachers and willing young Christian children can come together of their own volition and without any fear of the persecution in public schools you are concerned about, why is it so crucially important to get a minute of prayer into a public school environment where very many people (not all) do not believe it has a place? The above is a sincere question. Please consider it and share your response.

I was the one who had a good experience with my medical ethics class - even though I was falsely accused of plagerising a paper, but of course vindicated in the end. That would be ironic, cheating on an ethics paper, huh? I second your advocating of secular based ethics classes. Heady enough without injecting the Big G into the mix.

Let me see if I have it straight. If there is physical or emotional abuse heaped by students on gay/ostensably gay students in a public school setting where parents have a reasonable expectation that their kids are in a safe environment, it's an 'inevitable consequence.' But if school boards, etc., decide to keep that minute of prayer out of public schools then that's a national catastrophe worthy of considering a change in legislation at teh federal level? Okeedokee.

You are a smart man.

As usual, Soxy, YOU ROCK! This is so NOT about faith and so about self-righteous religiosos cramming it n the throat of the nation the see as Godless and in moral decay. Pray when you get up, in the shower, at the breakfast table, on your way to school, between classes (heck, pray to yourself during class if that's more important than the subject matter to you), between classes, on the bus home, yada yada. But keep it between you and the Big G. Isn't that what is SUPPOSED to matter. Freedom FOR relgion AND freedom FROM religion ARE IMPLICIT in the First Amendment. Anyone who suggests otherwise is bulls***ting you.

You're rolling tonight, Juggs. For every student who has been suspended because they 1) carry a Bible 2) wear a crucifix 3) pray the rosary at lunch... How many have been beaten up, belittled, killed, etc., because they 1) are gay 2) are believed to be gay 3) look gay to some mouthbreather toting arond a Bible ans an IQ of 60 That's where the laws shoul focus, don't you think?

Ethics classes are a great idea. Not morality classes, ethics classes. A medical ethics class I took in college was one of the best classes I ever took. But you're still kicking around in the deep end I see. Please rectify the following quotes with each other... and and Obviously your version of such a class IS a guise for getting religion in school. And a thinly veiled one at that.

It was both, according to Warren Z.

And by extension, of the majority of teachers and families in the Broward County school you referred to suported the trip to Gay Days you're also ok with that, correct? As far as the groping, the 'skirts with no underwear,' etc. at Gay Days claim, I've been to the last three and you have MY eye-witness account that I saw nothing obscene on any visit. I saw men holding the hands of other men and kissing each other, I saw women doing the same thing with women. But the amount of publicly acceptable affection (if you consider holding hands and kissind a loved one publicly acceptable) among the gay crowd was no more than among the straight crowd tthat day or any other. Yes, there is a lot of flamboyance on those days, and that's kind of the point, GAY PRIDE and all (My favorite last year was a bunch of unattached guys with shirts on that said:"Unsigned Free Agent" on them). The problem, I believe, is that you (not just you or course) find two men sharing a non-gratuitous kiss in public obscene, but you would not give a straight cpouple kissing a second thought. ... I have to go pick up my kid and get her to her T-ball game - I'll finish up this response later.

Godless Ones Unite!

Negro Modelo!!!!! I won't pass up a Dos Eques, Corona, or even a Tecate if they are handed to me. And I enjoy going toe-to-toe with a pitcher of margaritas too, even though the margaritas usually win.

One of the "Godless" here, Juggs. I promise you I am every bit as outraged by the Iraqi prisoner abuse as you are. Ditto for the disintegrating academic standards and integrity in America. But you go off the deep-end (and then some) when you suggest that these are symptoms of an underlying problem of "Godlessness" in our society. 80% of Americans state that they belong to an organized faith and half of these claim to be regular church-attending practitioners. The vast majority of these are Christians. If the backgrounds of the abusers in the Iraqi prison were examined I suspect you would find a similar breakdown. Sure, you can argue that calling yourself a Christian and truly being one are often wholly different matters, and I will agree with you (although I refuse to accept anyone as having the authority to deem who or what a "true Christian" is). But the solution to all the woes of modern American life is not to take militant steps to put God into (or back into) our schools, our government, our lives. There are myriad reasons society is in the shape it's in, and a lot of them have more to do with human greed, laziness, the economic realities of two working parents and their latch-key kids, etc., than how much time we spend offering our lives and works up to a Divine Agent that may or may not be up there to take our calls. I concur that maybe the Broward school trip to Disney during next week's Gay Days is more agenda than the diverse student body and their parents should be asked to swallow. I commend the administrator(s) who want to expand the minds of the straight and narrow, but there should be an alternative and equally fun trip for the students who don't want to go. At the same time, "What is the Arab world to think when a high school in Broward county purposefully schedules a trip to Disney world during gay pride week?" Are you serious??? I can tell you how much press coverage this earth-shattering story is going to get in the Arab world. [incidentally, I will be taking my wife and kids out this weekend to attend our fourth consecutive Gay Day at Disney. Being part of the straight-not narrow crowd, I feel it is important to show my support for both the gay community and for Disney who allows (while not officially sponsoring or sanctioning) the event despite lots of pressure and protest from the fundamentalist religiosos. My kids give the whole thing not a second glance or thought, as it should be, as they drag me onto the Pirates of the Caribbean ride for the 15th time...] But Juggs, what about this GLARING DOUBLE STANDARD?: If you're concerned about forcibly exposing the minds and immortal souls of the straight and narrow to the horrors of Gay Days at Disney, then why are you not equally upset by the prospect of unilaterally cramming whitebread Christianity down the throats of all students? Many of whom are not Christian and don't care to be bombarded by all the Fear of God claptrap. Others do come from Christian families but the families rightly realize that home and the church community are the more appropriate stewards of Junior's Godly upbringing than the homeroom teacher at P.S. 159. Your statement, "tolerance should not include cohersion [sic]" seems not to apply if all we are talking about coercion to force-feed children some government-approved Christian doctrine when they should be learning about math and science and history – including high points of Christian ideology like the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, the Holocaust. I enjoyed the statement, " I recall Lenon's [sic] famous lyrics .. imagine a world without religion" – mostly because you obviously do not recall them at all. Lennon also said, "God is a concept by which we measure our pain" (and bad marks to all who didn't peg that one when posted last week – CW and SS2k4 I'm looking in your direction...). I find little in today's world to suggest John was very far off on that one.

A site without a spellchecker?

Yeah, June "don't be so hard on the Beaver tonight, dear" Cleaver gets my vote too.

During a server upgrade a few months back I lost about 500 posts from my tally total. Jason, Isn't there some way a site update might accidentally knock a few (thousand) posts off of the totals of a certain pretender to the throne?

Yeah, most of Jasons numbers were put up during that infamous 'deadboard era' of SoxtTalk.