Time to dust off your tricorn hats, Gadsden flags, and anxiety medication: the Mississippi Tea Party is coming to town!
On January 7, the Tea Party is holding a rally at the Capitol where fives of their supporters will come out to protest the alleged tyranny of Common Core education standards which are designed to raise the bar for Mississippi students. This time, the Tea Party has called upon the support of the Mississippi Baptist Convention's political wing to aid their cause. I can't recall any references to Common Core anywhere in the New Testament.
On this day the Mississippi Tea Party, the MS Faith and Freedom Coalition and the MS Baptist Christian Action Commission are joining together to hold an Opposing Common Core Rally. The purpose of this rally will be to gather likeminded Mississippians and to tell the MS Legislature with one STRONG VOICE that action on Common Core must be taken NOW!
For months, the Tea Party, led by state Sen. Angela Hill (R-Picayune), have stirred up their base about the issue of Common Core. Their fear, no joke, is that teachers will peddle smut to children and that a Muslim indoctrination of young people across Mississippi will occur while the federal government sits back and belly laughs all the while. Heck, even Governor Bryant decided to issue a
meaningless executive order to alleviate the concerns of his increasingly Tea Party base by reassuring them that the state maintains its right to do as it will with education.
Those of us with bipedal locomotion know that Senator Hill and her ilk are doing nothing more than scaring their already paranoid base by listing a few hypothetical doomsday scenarios. The simple truth is that if the state Board of Education has a concern with the curriculum, they can take appropriate action where necessary. Additionally, Rep. John Moore (R-Brandon) and Sen. Gray Tollison (R-Oxford), chairmen of their respective education committees, have thus far indicated they do not see any reason to halt the continuation of Common Core.
Rather than advance Mississippi's educational system, Senator Hill and Governor Bryant continue to play into the paranoia of the Tea Party. These tactics seem similar to the fear mongering of previous decades when our state battled with the decision to move our public education system into the next generation or continue to spin its wheels in the mud. For folks like Hill and Bryant, they prefer playing in the mud. The rest of us would rather move on and build a quality education system worthy of our young people.
