Attacks on the education system in the United States by various extremist religious groups are not particularly noted for their subtlety. Or, for that matter, are they prime examples of genuine ethical behavior or respectful lawful conduct. There is a long list of tactics, ploys, and manipulations that have been lustfully engaged in by those who think that they and they alone have awareness of what some divine being wants for all. The list of these divisive and destructive activities would take pages, but a half dozen holy strategies are lumped together here for quick review.
1) Name-calling: It's easy to practice libel for the lord; and it is, after all, a favorite divisive tactic used by a number of biblical "prophets" and "holy men." A related tactic is casting aspersions upon some opponent or questioning the credential of some targeted educator or politician. This ploy shifts the attention away from their own lack of genuine credentials.
2) Indulging in political activity from the pulpit, or from and within similar tax-exempt institutions. What's wrong with that? According the accepted "holy" writings all priests and prophets held up as moral examples from the Bible manipulated the crowds politically in religious surroundings. Faith, to them, means a free ride and the need to answer only to themselves.
3) Threats: Usually of boycotts of local businesses that support a school system which the obsessed ones seek to shape for their personal religious practices: threats of lawsuits and filing of lawsuits against school districts or school personel. Closely related to this is the filing of complaints against material used in school--and which they usually have not read. In this same vein we should also include the use by fanatics of appalling intimidation of other liberal parents through inflammatory rhetoric.
4) Steal for salvation: --especially literary material: at the library they often check out books declared by manipulative pulpit masters to be "offensive" (meaning truthful) and don't return them. Better yet, just take the books! (Forget the command, Thou shalt not steal.) If that isn't possible they will insert their religious literature between pages of books that they deem to be offensive.
5) The old "faith" dodge: Hiding behind their facade of "faith"--which everyone is expected to accept as unquesionable qualification for issuing statements that hold little or no literary or scientific verification. This dodge makes it easy to muddy any issue and is quickly followed by demands that others show the exact source-citations used by their opponents. Some might call this hypocrisy.
6) Stretch the facts or statistics and bury any conflicting truth, and then say that anyone who does not agree with their religious view is either faithless or unpatriotic. (The Bush crowd loved this one.) A variation of this tactic is to shovel anything with which they disagree into some broad category to target for belittling. Examples of such underhanded tactics are phrases such as: ..a secular humanist notion: --a new age concept;--deviant dedication (they should indeed know about that one);--they're unpatriotic, etc. etc.
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