{"id":342,"date":"2003-09-05T18:41:35","date_gmt":"2003-09-06T02:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thechunk.com\/blog\/archive\/smash-the-state\/"},"modified":"2003-09-05T18:41:35","modified_gmt":"2003-09-06T02:41:35","slug":"smash-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/archive\/smash-the-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Smash the state"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an op-ed<\/a> in the Houston Chronicle<\/a> about the new law mandating the Texas pledge and moment of silence in all schools. It’s by a government teacher and third year law student named Jaye Ramsey Sutter<\/a> (found on Off the Kuff<\/a>). <\/p>\n

I have to say that I agree with her. I’ve been thinking about this since school started. Henry’s school does the pledges and moment of silence during assembly in the morning, which the parents are welcome to attend. I usually stick around simply to spend a little time with Henry before I go to work. Mary and I have discussed this and it bothers me a little more each time I’m subjected to it. The Texas pledge is a hollow, watered down version of the U.S. pledge. It seems pointless to me, the product of a politician with too much time on his hands looking for something that would score him some feel good points with his constituents. I’m sure the other legislators followed suit so as not to rock the boat or upset any of their own consitituents.<\/p>\n

I’d like to tell Henry that he doesn’t have to follow any of it if he doesn’t want to, but there are other factors involved. As Ms. Sutter points out, it could open him to ridicule from his classmates and go on his “permanent record” (which is probably a good thing). I’d like to tell him, but he wouldn’t care or understand. He’s 4. All he cares about is what’s on Teen Titans after school and whether or not there’s a movie out in the theaters that we’ll allow him to see. I think I’ll save the civil disobedience lesson for later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle about the new law mandating the Texas pledge and moment of silence in all schools. It’s by a government teacher and third year law student named Jaye Ramsey Sutter (found on Off the Kuff). I have to say that I agree with her. I’ve been thinking about this […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-2-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fonJ-5w","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}