The other day I was getting worked up over Oklahoma requiring Bibles in every classroom. Then, I began to think why. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a bad idea and we should try to stop it. On the other hand, as bad ideas go, it is far down the list on what is important. Some religious people think that the mere presence of the Bible in the classroom will somehow magically change the children forced to sit in a room with it into Christians.

I am betting this won’t happen. If I seriously thought that these proponents of the Bible in the classroom could create an effective educational program that incorporated the Bible I might be worried. They really have no ideas beyond prayer and patriotism and if they tried to do anything more they would begin to fight among themselves. Christians, if you recall, have violently argued with one another for centuries about Christian Doctrine. Indeed, this was the main reason why the Founding Fathers wanted a religious neutral government — Christian sects have a tendency to rumble if it is possible to get an upper hand with another Christian sect.

So why is this meaningless gesture getting me so worked up? Because it is headline news. The press is only interested in controversy. Controversy brings in readers which brings in ad revenue and so the press will search for controversial issues to feed to the American public. They aren’t feeding the public anything that is particularly nutritious either. It is more like a table filled with desserts that we can’t help but pile onto our plates and finish them off in one sitting. Until we make ourselves sick.

It is an easy enough bon bon to make too. Anything to do with religion in public schools was sure to piss of every secular humanist in the country while getting the full fledge support of fundamental Christians. Some editor somewhere decided to fed this particular controversy to the American public because they knew their readers would lap it up and then raise their fists ready for battle. Sadly, they were correct.

What is so annoying is that I know this is the game. Sensationalism is the only consistent menu item and I keep falling for it. There is a good chance that the Bibles in every classroom will never happen or it will be slowed down in the courts for years to come and, after a few years of squabbling over this, and realizing that it is way too difficult to make it happen, the combatants will move on to something new to argue about.

More worrisome, is it illustrates the Media’s focus on divisive topics. Anyone looking at education would think that the most important topic in American education is the treatment of Trans children because a lot of people are talking about it. In reality, there are 73,000,000 people in the USA under the age of 18.. Of those 73,000,000, 42,000 of them have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and only 4,200 of these children have started hormone therapy. This means that when people are talking about this, they are talking about .00005 % of the student population.

The treatment of Trans children in public schools and religion in the public schools need to be addressed but that it dominates any discussion regarding education in the 2024 campaign is out of all proportion to how it affects the vast majority of public school students. It is there only to instill rage and division which is all really great fun for the Press but does very little to improve public schools.