Republican North Carolina School Board Abolishes Integration Policy

We already knew that the Gop and its Tea Party branch were anti-gay given the preponderance of Christianists in both groups. Now, the GOP backed by Tea Party factions which has taken control of the Wake Forest County school board seem Hell bent to prove that they are outright racists as well. While a federal lawsuit has been filed challenging the move, in the interim the new GOP majority has voted to abolish busing for racial integration. Frankly, I am not surprised given the undercurrent of racism that I have long discerned in the typically lily white "pro-family" and "Christian" organizations that have made an industry out of denigrating gays, Muslims, and anyone else that doesn't fit their "white bread" and fundamentalist evangelical religious views. In fact, I'd go so far as to venture that when a group or individual describes itself/themselves as "conservative Christian," the safest approach is to assume that beneath the surface, they are anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-Hispanic and certainly anti-Muslim. Indeed, they probably are against government assistance for the poor, the hungry and the homeless since these folks have flushed Christ's Gospel message down the toilet. Here are highlights from the Washington Post on this example of naked prejudice:
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The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.
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But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.
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And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.
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The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.
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But critics accuse the new board of pursuing an ideological agenda aimed at nothing less than sounding the official death knell of government-sponsored integration in one of the last places to promote it. Without a diversity policy in place, they say, the county will inevitably slip into the pattern that defines most districts across the country, where schools in well-off neighborhoods are decent and those in poor, usually minority neighborhoods struggle.
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The NAACP has filed a civil rights complaint arguing that 700 initial student transfers the new board approved have already increased racial segregation, violating laws that prohibit the use of federal funding for discriminatory purposes. In recent weeks, federal education officials visited the county, the first step toward a possible investigation.
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[T]he GOP fielded the victorious bloc of school board candidates who railed against "forced busing." The nation's largest tea party organizers, Americans for Prosperity - on whose national board Pope sits - cast the old school board members as arrogant "leftists." Two libertarian think tanks, which Pope funds almost exclusively, have deployed experts on TV and radio.
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Many local leaders see another irony in the possible balkanization of the county's schools at a time when society is becoming more interconnected than ever. "People want schools that mirror their neighborhood, but the bigger picture is my kid in the suburbs is connected to kids in Raleigh," said the Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Martin Street Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh. "We're trying to connect to the world but we're separating locally? There is something wrong."