TOM DELAY, SACK OF HAMMERS

There's a report in today's Houston Chronicle on a speech Tom DeLay gave at a church urging parents not to send their kids to A&M or Baylor if they want them to get a Christian education. While I'd ordinarily applaud any advice that keeps kids out of College Station, I can't subscribe to DeLay's reasoning. Seems the failure to teach creationism, combined with the fact that some students have sex in the dorms (how shocking!), makes these campuses un-Christian. Wake up, Tommy. Some of us Christians can get our minds around the fact that God could just as easily have created man through evolution as out of a lump of clay (and the former is perhaps more miraculous than the latter). Some of us can even understand that the scientific method rests on proof, not faith, and that we do not betray our faith by embracing science to explain the state of this world.



The Chron dug up an old quote of DeLay's linking, with the subtle, clever sarcasm only a true wordsmith can muster, the Columbine tragedy with the teaching of evolution. As a bonus, he makes up a word ("evolutionized") in the process.



I shouldn't be surprised at Delay; after all, there's a picture of him next to "dogmatic" in the dictionary. I was interested to hear that his daughter, who went to A&M, "had horrible experiences with coed dorms and guys who spent the weekends in the rooms with girls." What horrible experience could this refer to? Walking in on a roommate and her boyfriend? Not getting any herself? Wait, I forgot she was Tom DeLay's daughter. Her problem must be with the fact that someone, somewhere (it just happened to be on her campus) was doing something of which she disapproved, and by God, they needed to be stopped. Good thing such an intolerant, silly little girl is not in a position of influence in this country. Whoops.



A DeLay hatchet man -- er, staffer -- reacted decisively, reminding us that the recording of the speech was unauthorized (after all, is it the public's damn business what the third most powerfull man in the House says to a gathering of hundreds?) and that the offending taper is a former member of the ACLU whose organization is to the left of Hillary Clinton. How he forgot to take a swipe at the trial lawyers, I don't know.



Yuo sure have to hand it to DeLay for being forward looking though. He reminded the crowd that there were "still some Christian schools out there -- good, solid schools. Now, they may be little, they may not be as prestigious as Stanford, but your kids will get a good, solid, godly education." Bob Jones University, maybe? Frankly, I think this recommendation was a master stroke. By urging parents to send their kids off to these schools, he promotes the creation of more narrow-minded conformists that blindly obey authority -- his very constituency!



As for where to send your kids to college, how about this? First, teach them right from wrong and to think critically about whatever they see and hear, in class and out. Then send them to the most intellectually rigorous college you can afford and they can get into. If you've done the groundwork, they won't come back crazy, or corrupted, but educated. And that's what it's all about.