The Freedom From Religion Foundation is running a full-page ad in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette this Sunday with the headline: “Yes, Governor Huckabee-Sanders — You’re Right. ‘Schools must educate, not indoctrinate.’”
There the agreement ends.
The state/church watchdog, with more than 40,000 members and several chapters nationwide (including hundreds of members and a chapter in Arkansas), then urges, “Governor, stop your culture war.” It is Huckabee Sanders, FFRF charges, who wants to use public schools to indoctrinate students, by censoring books and defunding what FFRF calls the “symbol of our democracy — public schools.”
“Your voucher scheme will destroy Arkansas public schools,” FFRF tells Huckabee Sanders. Her plan proposes to divert as much as $343 million from public schools to private, mostly religious schools by the second year of her universal voucher program. These are the schools that “specialize in indoctrination,” not our public schools.
FFRF also chides the governor for caring about life “all the way from conception . . . to birth.” Huckabee Sanders has signed an absurd law to erect a monument to unborn fetuses on state Capitol grounds but meanwhile Arkansas has the nation’s highest maternal mortality rate, the nation’s third-highest infant mortality rate and ranks among the worst in overall child well-being. “So much for concern for life,” says the ad.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics), calls on Arkansas freethinkers to fight back to support public schools and keep religion free from religious control.
FFRF is currently suing to remove a monument to the biblical Ten Commandments on the Capitol grounds in Little Rock. “The state of Arkansas has no business telling citizens which gods to have, how many gods to have or whether to have any gods at all,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-founder.
