More Shroder Nonsense

On a lower post, Jen Shroder seems to think that I've blocked her from commenting. She's wrong.

Ed, why does it appear that I'm blocked from an Aug 11 page where you make a lot of ridiculous claims?

I have no idea, but it's not true. It's not possible to block someone from commenting only on one specific post without blocking the comments on that post completely. The comments are open. But I have no idea what you're referring to, since the only thing I posted on August 11th was about the Worldnutdaily and Reverend Moon.

I don't have time to really go over all of your claims, but a huge faux pas is that I wrote my clinton article long before Newsmax did. And a lot of the research you claim other authors didn't do, is backed up at my extended Clinton article, which the one you quoted links to.

Well in one of your articles on the subject, you cite the Newsmax article. Regardless, it simply is not true that Alamoudi "wrote" the "guidelines" (which was really just a statement of what the courts have ruled on various church/state issues that involved public schools). The reality is that one person who represented one of over thirty organizations, including many conservative groups like the Christian Legal Society and the National Association of Evangelicals, has now been accused of fundraising for another organization that is believed to have ties to Palestinian extremists. That accurate reality gets turned into "terrorists are writing our school guidelines to teach Islam!" and other hysterically overblown claims.

There are numerous false statements in your article on the subject. First, these are not "Clinton's guidelines". President Clinton only asked that they be distributed to public schools because they are an accurate statement of what the courts have ruled over the years on various issues that school administrators face in terms of church and state. This was done to protect religious liberties. Furthermore, the guidelines are entirely reasonable and true as statements of current case law. And nowhere in your article do you even attempt to show a single statement in them that is false. I especially like this bit of stupidity:

School districts are pressured to utilize Clintons guidelines which he sold to America as "issued by 35 religious groups," failing to disclose they include many civil rights groups and are all described by the ACLU as committed to separation of church and state.

They "fail to disclose" that those 35 religious groups included many civil rights groups? Wow, that really changes everything, doesn't it? Civil rights groups? What's next, people who support freedom? How absurd. Schools are not "pressured" to accept those guidelines, the guidelines tell them what the courts have ruled previously. That's important information for school administrators to know, isn't it? And in most cases, the court rulings are much more reasonable than many administrators and teachers think they are. For example, when a teacher assigns a paper to be written about someone the student admires and then tells a student that they can't write about Jesus, that teacher is acting illegally according to previous court rulings in similar circumstances. And the guidelines in question point that out:

7. Students may express their religious beliefs in the form of reports, homework and artwork, and such expressions are constitutionally protected. Teachers may not reject or correct such submissions simply because they include a religious symbol or address religious themes. Likewise, teachers may not require students to modify, include or excise religious views in their assignments, if germane. These assignments should be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance, relevance, appearance and grammar.

Again, these guidelines were designed to give teachers and administrators an accurate statement of current law in this regard so that they would not overstep their boundaries and violate the religious liberties of students. The rest of the article is about Clinton's ties to Muslims, which I just couldn't possibly care any less about. I don't care if Clinton has ties to Satan himself, I am not a Clinton supporter and it has nothing to do with whether those guidelines are accurate and reasonable or not.

Shroder has actually written about this several times on her website. In this article she makes more ridiculous statements about these guidelines. She writes:

Therefore Clinton colluded with secular and religious-sounding groups and based his new Presidential Guidelines (2) on a document drafted by the American Muslim Council, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU which owns the copyright and many of the very groups attempting to censor Christianity today. This document can now be easily viewed (3).

For some reason, they linked to a Google cached version of the guidelines themselves; for the easier version, click here. It's amusing that she focuses solely on the American Muslim Council, the ACLU and Americans United and dismisses the other 32 organizations that signed the document as merely "religious-sounding", all in an attempt to support the ridiculous thesis that this is part of some big indoctrination program to convert our kids to Islam. In point of fact, the American Muslim Council is the ONLY Muslim group on the list of organizations that signed on to support this document, and the list includes some very conservative Christian groups, like the National Association of Evangelicals, the Christian Legal Society, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But that's just the beginning of the nonsense:

In the guidelines, every single "religious expression" that opens the door for Islam came equipped with a clause of escape, (2a) a backdoor for the ACLU to attack should anything Christian dare enter public schools under the same guidelines as Islam employs.

Now folks, I've given the link to the entire document. If you can find one "backdoor" that says Islam is allowed and Christianity is not, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I'll eat your hat. This is pure delusion.

Clinton then presented these guidelines as originally drafted by "35 religious groups" and named it "Religious Expression in Public School. "Clinton failed to inform us, however, that these particular "religious groups" share a commitment to separation of church and state, as stated on the ACLU original draft.

LOL. Actually, these groups have very different views on what separation of church and state should mean, but they signed on to these guidelines as an accurate representation of what the courts have ruled, which was the whole purpose. I love the attempt here to make groups like the Christian Legal Society out to be some fake religious group that's really a liberal front group. Go look at the CLS webpage and look at their positions and tell me that's not incredibly stupid to imply. They supported the Federal Marriage Amendment; they support Bush's faith based initiative policy; they supported the Boy Scouts in their legal fight over gay and atheist chaplains; they filed a brief opposing Newdow in the pledge of allegiance case along with Concerned Women for America. This is a very conservative Christian group that would be opposed in most cases by the ACLU. Yet they agreed that the guidelines in question were an accurate statement of current case law, which is all it was intended to do. Oh, but she's not done yet. She actually claims that these guidelines, because they say that children are allowed to talk to their fellow students about their religion (which is true) and distribute religious literature to them (also true), are promoting Islam.

To be granted rights to perform Dawa in America's public schools was a huge victory for Islam. Clinton gave them Dawa, our schools, our very children with his religious guidelines and cloaked it with a false inclusion of Christianity.

Uh, Jen, Clinton didn't "give them" anything. The courts ruled long ago that students have the right to talk to others and give them literature about their religious views. 99% of the time when this is done, it's done by Christian students, but Muslim students have exactly the same rights. Does that bother you? Should Muslims not have that right, only Christians? It's just hilarious that you take perfectly true and reasonable guidelines that say kids are allowed to talk about their religion, guidelines that are used 99% of the time to defend Christian students doing so, and claim that because they protect Muslim students doing the same thing that therefore this constitutes a conspiracy to "give" our children to Islam. Are you really this fucking stupid, or are you pretending to be? It hardly seems possible that someone could be this clueless and still manage to log on to a computer.

All of this is sheer lunacy. There is nothing in those guidelines that is inaccurate, and they were issued by a wide range of organizations from across the political spectrum. Shroder is simply delusional if she thinks they were issued as part of some conspiracy to indoctrinate our children in Islam and destroy Christianity. This is the martyr pose taken to insane extremes.