I was checking out one of my news apps to see if the world had ended when I wasn’t paying attention. This story showed up. Imagine this with a big FoxNews headline across the site (the app is an aggregator, not a FN app) saying Fair and Balanced. I’ll emphasize the prime examples of fair and balanced in bold italics.

Pagan mom challenges Bibles in North Carolina school
Jan 18, 2012

A pagan mother’s challenge to the distribution of donated Bibles at a local school has prompted the Buncombe County Board of Education to reevaluate its policies regarding religious texts.

Ginger Strivelli, who practices Wicca, said she was upset when her 12-year-old son came home from North Windy Ridge intermediate school with a Bible. The Gideons International had delivered several boxes of the sacred books to the school office. The staff allowed interested students to stop by and pick them up.

“Schools should not be giving out one religion’s materials and not others,” Strivelli said.

According to Strivelli, the principal assured her the school would make available religious texts donated by any group. But when Strivelli showed up at the school with pagan spell books, she was turned away.
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“You can either open your public school up to all religious material, or you can say no religious material,” Michael Broyde, a professor and senior fellow at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion said. “You can’t say, ‘You can distribute religious material, but only from the good mainstream faiths.'”
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Traditionally, that “grand experiment” has involved Judaism and a handful of Christian denominations. But as non-traditional faiths spread into new communities, longstanding customs such as prayer, Christmas plays and Bibles that once went unquestioned in public schools are finding themselves under increased scrutiny.

“Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, not on Wiccan principles,” Bobby Honeycutt, who attended public schools in Weaverville during the 1970s, said. 

“Our children have access to more non-Christian print material in the libraries and online than they really do Christian stuff,” he said. 

While many Weaverville Christians see recent events as a threat to tradition, others see a purpose in enforcing church-state separation in public schools, because even the nation’s traditional faiths have divisions.

“Many Christians have stood up and said they agree with me too,” Strivelli said. “Because, as much as they may like the Bible, they don’t want Jehovah’s Witnesses coming in with Watch Tower (magazines) or Catholics coming in and having them pray the Rosary.”

Ah, yes, the “traditional faiths”. I take it they aren’t refering to Native American religions when they say that.

I love Mr. Bobby Honeycutt’s quotes. I don’t know who he is or how he is related to this story at all since they don’t mention it. I have to assume he’s the equivalent of the lady in her housedress and curlers standing in front of her trailer smoking a cigarette after the tornado went through.

And last but not least the pagan lady’s quote at the end sums up the religious attitude of this community when she says that the Christians don’t want the Catholics to come into the schools.

If only they could have worked in some “War on Christmas” stuff…. oh wait, they did.

I saw a bumper sticker today that said, “I get my comedy from Fox News and my news from Comedy Central.” I should have bought it.