Where to find textbooks for your private little Madrassa

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn't taken a friend's advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old's biology lessons.

Mule's precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth's excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin's theory.

"I thought she was going to have a coronary," Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. "She's like, 'This is not true!'"

Read more here.

It is often said that citizens ought to be prepared to make sacrifices in times of war.  Those fighting the culture war are prepared to sacrifice their children's science education.  I guess this isn't really surprising: children often are the innocent victims of war.

These are the children who will grow up to complain to deans in colleges and universities that the evolutionary biologist teaching their biology course is ramming evolution down their throats.  And they will be told that that is what evolutionary biologists do for Christ's sake, and that they don't actually have to believe what they're being taught in order to learn it.  And they will go on to live in their self-imposed intellectual dark age, complaining that they are being persecuted in a land drowning in the irrationality of religion, waiting for an afterlife that doesn't exist, oblivious to the fact that they have been used as mere tools in the culture wars. 

And as my wife just pointed out to me, even if evolution turns out to be false, to indoctrinate your child into believing that evolution is false is to cripple your child by hindering her future efforts to participate in the practice of science if as an adult she chooses to.   It borders on child abuse. 

And some Republicans want us to privatize virtually everything in our lives, and allow Apologia "Educational" Ministries to prey upon our children?  Are we out of our freaking minds?