Christian Right Demands Access to Private School Kids

Today, RightMarch.com sent me an email about how troubled they are that a teacher at a high school in Pennsylvania refused to give anti-choice protesters access to students during a social sciences class field trip to a Planned Parenthood office.

Says RightMarch:

More than a dozen teenagers from the Solebury School in New Hope, PA, were bused to the local Planned Parenthood clinic where they spent several hours inside the clinic, and even donned the bright orange vests worn by pro-abortion "escorts" who meet and accompany women coming for abortions.

The email went on to rail against liberals in general and they even went to the extent of asking their readers to contact the school and complain about the anti-choice protesters not being given access to the children!

The Solebury School is a secular, private, college-prep school located in New Hope, PA. That's in Bucks County, PA, a wealthy exurb of Philadelphia that voted a Democratic majority (51% vs. 48%) in the 2004 presidential election.

The social sciences teacher supervising the field trip refused to give the anti-choice protesters access to the students, whereupon RightMarch complains that kids "were only allowed to hear one side of the story."

Something that immediately caught my eye is how RightMarch uses a propagandistic term--"bused"--to describe how the students were transported to the clinic. Not only does their particular use of the term carry negative civil rights connotations to play on the emotions of their conservative readers, it also seems almost to suggest that the students were taken there against their will.

(I guess it didn't occur to them that here in Greenville, for example, Bob Jones students get "bused" to the mall and various other places on a regular basis.)

If field trips are still the same as when I was growing up in the '70s, your parents had to be advised about what the field trip would consist of, then sign a permission slip and return it to the school. I would surmise that encounters with anti-choice protesters were not authorized by the parents as being part of the field trip. If a minor was physically injured or emotionally damaged as a result of the unauthorized encounter with the anti-choice protesters, the school and the teacher could have been exposed to legal liability. So the teacher did the right thing by not allowing the anti-choice protesters to have unauthorized access to the kids that were under his supervision.

To add insult to injury, RightMarch has called on its supporters to contact the school and bombard them with complaints about the teacher not allowing the anti-choice protesters to have access to the kids. They're also encouraging their supporters to send "Letters to the Editor" to newspapers papers all across the US protesting their lack of access to the schoolkids.

RightMarch: We've set up our website so that you can send your own personal comment to Solebury School Headmaster John Brown, AND to teacher Jason Gordon, regarding this issue. You can even copy your letter to the editor of the local newspaper. (We've deliberately left the letter blank, so that you can put your OWN WORDS into your demand for equal rights for conservatives at school.) Click below NOW to send your FREE message -- be courteous, no bad language please:

("No bad language please"? I thought these were Christians! LOL.)

The big lie here, the prideful presumption, is RightMarch's arrogant attitude of "entitlement"--thinking that by virtue of their own perceived holiness and perceived righteousness, they should have been given access, without the parents' knowledge, to students who attend a secular private school.