Total Living Network Finds
Backdoor Into Public Schools
Kris Nielsen
From: Kris Nielsen
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: October 11, 2001 8:18 AM
Subject: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Fundamentalist Christians are backing down from the direct-approach attacks on our First Amendment. There are fewer voices pushing the Ten Commandments onto the walls of our children's classrooms. But they certainly haven't backed down. They are not taking a break. They are simply using another strategy.
TLN, the Total Living Network, is a national fundamentalist Christian broadcast organization which believes its responsibility is to counter "today's cluttered channels by entertaining, educating, and empowering" through the doctrines of Christianity. In August 2000, this organization began an effort known as the Operation 10 Book Cover Project, a campaign launched to distribute book covers to public school children. Ten book covers, which are pasted with the Ten Commandments on one side and "Good Thinking" quotes from well-known people, are sent to recipients 10 per mailing.
The website states the 2001 campaign objective: "to distribute more than one million Ten Commandments book covers around the world." The project was started by the head of the Chicago Public Schools and TLN in a joint effort to distribute the book covers intensely throughout the Chicago Public Schools system.
This is not a sneaky, hidden way to distribute Christian documents throughout our schools. TLN makes it well known that this is a campaign with a strong intent to distribute and to minister. Their website even includes facts about the Department of Education's regulations for distribution of religious documents by students and the separation between church and state to show how closely they came to breaking the law, without actually infringing on any Constitutional laws.
The disturbing fact, however, is that the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools was a co-initiator of this project. He was the one who approved the distribution by TLN of these book covers. This act is a violation of the line between church and state, or what's left of it.
Although the campaign is disguised as an effort to help students express themselves, it is also fairly obvious that this is an effort to push the Ten Commandments into our schools by default. How long will it take before fundamentalists, parents, and lawmakers begin saying, "they're all over the children's books anyway, it won't make any difference if we place them on the walls"?
The distribution is funded only in part by private donors. Being a ministry, TLN no doubt receives tax relief and a benefit from the faith-based initiatives pioneered by President George W. Bush.
It is my opinion that the launch of this program was illegal since it was started in Chicago Public Schools and approved by the CEO of this system. Although it seems to operate on the edges of the laws or through loopholes now, this program promises the further, and quicker, breakdown of our precious First Amendment.
Proud to be an American
From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Kris Nielsen"
Subject: Re: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Date: October 11, 2001 12:43 PM
I think it could be a healthy experience for some of these youngsters to later wake up and realize that they've been duped into compromising the letter and the spirit of the law of the land so that the greedy adults who are exploiting them can amass political power, ultimately to put themselves in a position to be able to force their own will upon others. Such exploitation will not escape the eyes of youngsters simply because they are young and inexperienced: we all, as humans, can detect gross unfairness when we see it; we all are able to recognize opportunism -- perhaps not right away, while it's happening, but almost all of us can eventually see that we've been had.
Over the past several weeks, as I hear about the various schemes being foisted upon youngsters for the purpose of placing these parasitic adults into positions of power, my response has begun to sound like a broken record: "This cannot but backfire! (Skip!) This cannot but backfire! (Skip!) This cannot but backfire!" I saw it happen during the closing years and the aftermath of the McCarthy Era of anti-Communist and anti-Atheist hysteria: a whole generation of kids did not trust their parents because some of what their parents told them was a big, fat lie (the McCarthy line, the anti-drug line, the pro-war line).
And that can be quite an interesting lesson indeed -- especially if there are other very visible groups of youngsters working with adults who are working to uphold the letter and the spirit of the law, and whose arguments about religious freedom can actually be defended under any context. The best we can hope for is that we are seen treating our kids (all kids we come in contact with) with respect and dignity, and that we never be found to have lied to them. When this comes out (and it will), all the kids who have watched how we deal with our kids will take note and, when grasping for answers simply from having been tossed into a raging sea of confusion wrought by exploitation, they might find (in truthfulness and anything else we held dear) some solid rock upon which to rebuild their lives.
Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six years of service to
people with no reason to believe
From: Kris Nielsen
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: October 11, 2001 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Are there Which Ten Commandments? book covers? Or would they be adapted from current literature? I have already planned to distribute National Bible Week posters with the financial and physical backing of the New Mexico Humanist Association and the Campus Freethinkers Association. I believe that for a student to display the Ten Commandments on his/her textbooks is a protected freedom that I treasure: the right to express oneself through speech and literature. However, the campaign I wrote on is one initiated by an evangelical corporation targeting students as their soldiers in an education invasion.
The First Amendment (as interpreted by the courts) says that, in mostly official matters, if religion is catered to, secularism must be catered to and vise versa. I will definitely look into skeptical and freethought book covers. And hopefully your readers will join in.
Thanks for your comments,
Kris Nielsen
From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Kris Nielsen"
Subject: Re: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Date: October 11, 2001 8:10 PM
I have, since The Texas Book Cover Flap, offered to allow our "Which Ten Commandments?" handbill to be adapted to book covers. The offer also holds for the "National Bible Week" poster (though some might question the appropriateness for youngsters of the Bible passages in the section "Uncut & Unsubtle").
But both can be adapted to a book cover with little trouble: "Which" might look better if it were retypeset (and I have complete typesetting software); "NBW" would look good converted to EPS and then placed as-is as the front and back surfaces of covers which would, of course, employ other decorations.
Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six years of service to
people with no reason to believe
From: Kris Nielsen
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: October 12, 2001 3:20 AM
Subject: Re: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Thanks for informing me of your offer. I'll see what I can do with it. I also have some good software to play with, so I'll see what I can come up with.
Thanks again,
Kris Nielsen
From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Kris Nielsen"
Subject: Re: TLN finds backdoor into our schools
Date: October 12, 2001 8:00 AM
The point is that we can and perhaps should do something.
The tricky part is in what I've been saying all along: even to identify as an atheist is to suggest you are somebody who is anti-religion -- and anti-anything just does not fly these days. In identifying oneself as an atheist one must be very careful.
But there's always the option of doing things that we believe in, such as supporting science education and popularizing rational thought, which are not the exclusive domains of atheism. Thus, I think book covers which explain and promote Liberal Scientific Method could do a world of good. I would just love to be involved in a project designed to popularize the notion that nobody is the arbiter of human knowledge, that anybody is allowed to present evidence in an attempt to topple the dominant paradigm, that the whole point of science is to submit one's ideas to the scrutiny of one's peers specifically seeking that your own ideas be shot down if they have serious flaws in them, or that the flaws be routed if those they have are only minor. True, this would not be the exclusive domain of atheism -- but then, where does it say that what we do must be entirely and exclusively atheistic?
Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six years of service to
people with no reason to believe
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