You can't reason with these people:

In the wake of the Amish school shooting, The CBS Evening News had, on their Free Speech segment, Brian Rohrbough, a father of a boy that was killed at Colombine. Here is what he had to say: (emp add)

I'm saddened and shaken by the shooting at an Amish school today, and last week’s school murders.

When my son Dan was murdered on the sidewalk at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, I hoped that would be the last school shooting. Since that day, I’ve tried to answer the question, "Why did this happen?"

This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.

We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.

Suicide has become an acceptable action and has further emboldened these criminals. And we are seeing an epidemic increase in murder-suicide attacks on our children.

Sadly, our schools are not safe. In fact, we now witness that within our schools. Our children have become a target of terrorists from within the United States.

There you have it. Not enough God in the schools. Evolution. Abortion. And let's not forget that there are terrorists within the United States. The paranoid style in action.

These people vote and are why Republicans hold power. How can you possibly reason with them? And while we're at it, kudos to CBS for putting this guy front and center. In the immediate aftermath that's exactly what you want, a hard-right-Christian perspective to lens the news with.

UPDATE: CBS started out their Nightly News with a report on the Amish school shooting. Then there was the news about Mark Foley and Woodward's book. Towards the end of the show was the Free Speech segment. When Katie Couric announced that the commentator would be a parent of a child killed at Columbine, this viewer expected words of comfort for those families affected in the Amish community, remarks about cherishing your children, and maybe a call to wait until an investigation is completed before making any conclusions. But instead, a startling repetition of Tom DeLay's house floor speech about Columbine

"we place our children in day care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers under the law of the jungle"

"because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some pri-mordial soup"

along with talking points atraight from James Dobson about abortion. Media Matters has reported that CBS's Free Speech has been overwhelmingly conservative. Instances like today's, with Brian Rohrbough, do nothing to dispel that notion.


posted by Quiddity at 10/02/2006 07:00:00 PM