Saturday, April 01, 2006

A win for the good guys

Back on March 29 our friend White Trash Republican posted this on her blog. It seems that her children’s school was sporting some posters, slick professionally done jobs, supplied by the Southern Poverty Law Center. For those of you who don’t know, the SPLC is a belfry in which nest a large number of especially vicious moonbats. These posters promoted “tolerance”. Apparently the posters are attractive and feature “quotes by notable Americans on them” which are not objectionable in and of themselves. Of course they also feature the web address of the SPLC and come with a teacher’s handbook on how to indoctrinate children into the hyper left-wing idea of “tolerance”.

This led to WTR going ballistic and having a “gentle and civil” conversation with her kid’s principal (and you thought that tremor you felt was the military testing that new 7000 ton explosive in Nevada). This led to the principal actually going to the SPLC’s website and seeing what they were really all about.

A phone call with fulsome apologies to WTR followed. Assurances that that organization’s values in no way reflect the values of her school, and I tend to believe this since the school in question is located in Missouri, not San Francisco.

What came of this was a compromise in which the school would keep the posters while blacking out the web address and name of the SPLC and no aspect of the leftist message of the SPLC will find its way into the school’s curriculum. A victory had been won, but WTR is less than happy. Here is what she says:

Anyway, long story short- I caved some. Ain't proud of it, but hey, I gotta live here, too, as do my younguns. Yeah, I know-no excuse. But my primary worry was the curriculum. Since they had no intentions of introducing any of the curriculum or lessons into the classes, we agreed that the posters could stay. So it was a weak compromise, but my main concern had been addressed...
[the rest is here]

I want to take this opportunity to explain to her, and the rest of you (which is why I’m posting this here and not on the comments section of her blog), why I think that she has nothing to be sorry for. In fact I think that she won an unalloyed victory.

In the first place let us remember that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a leach. It produces nothing (except trouble for the productive class) and must survive by holding its hand out for contributions. The production of posters is not cheap. Remember it isn’t just a matter of paying printing costs, but of having the original artwork done as well. Then they have to be shipped out to those who order them and in order to get orders in the first place they have to be promoted. The card that the teacher at WTR’s school filled out and sent in cost money to print and place. It doubtless also included free postage.

SPLC must have staff to process these orders, or they must pay a processing center to do it for them. Ditto for shipping. Also the nice metal frames that came with the posters must be procured and that costs additional money. All-in-all that package of posters represents an investment of resources for the SPLC which, thanks to WTR’s efforts, will never pay them any return.

If the contact information for SPLC had been allowed to remain on the posters it is likely that one or more of the teachers at the school would have gone over to their website and checked them out. Since it is a regrettable fact that the schools of education draw from the lower end of the IQ pool (go to any college with an education department and you will find that the students studying to become teachers will be in the bottom third of that college’s IQ distribution) it is likely that one or more of those teachers would have been swayed by their indoctrination. This would have led to the whole “tolerance” brain washing package being introduced into her children’s school.

As things stand now any questions about tolerance that the display of the posters brings up can be addressed in a manner consistent with the values of the community. In other words tolerance can be explained to the children in the traditional American sense (we do not round up homosexuals and murder them like Islamic countries do) rather than the insane moonbat sense (we pass laws forcing the First Baptist Church to perform homosexual “weddings”).

As I said a victory has been won. The SPLC has expended some of its finite resources in a way which could actually work against their agenda instead of spending them in a way which might have done real harm (which is their goal). I would encourage everyone to do the same thing. Send away for any free materials that moonbat organizations offer. So what if you get put on their mailing list and get lots of junk mail. It costs you nothing to throw away unopened mail and it costs them a great deal to send it. Let them burn up their cash sending appeals to people that they will never convince rather than reaching mushy moderates who they might sway.