So your telling me that a QUESTION is a lie?

lying in his classroom about evolution…

And when someone wears a Slayer T-shirt they are forcing their religion on me?

Or even consider this….

Military decorations;

Bronze/Silver Star……five pointed stars.
Legion of Merit…..five pointed star, points inverted.
Soldier’s Medal…..an octagon
Air Medal……a “sunburst”
Army Commendation Medal…..a hexagon
Army Achievement Medal…..an octagon.

so now the military is pushing religion on me as well?

I had Mr. Freshwater as a teacher when I was in school. Unless he’s changed DRASTICALLY he’s been demonized by the media. But who would ever think that the media could possibly do such a thing?

The tool a student says his science teacher used to burn a cross on his arm comes with a warning: Never touch or come in contact with the high voltage output of this device.

When the boy’s parents complained, administrators at Mount Vernon Middle School told John Freshwater, the school’s eighth-grade science teacher, to lock up or remove the BD-10A High Frequency Generator from the classroom. About the same size and shape as a power screwdriver, its tip puts out up to 50,000 volts of electricity.

Science teachers use the generator to ionize gases in a test tube so that students can identify them by their glowing colors.

But Freshwater, the student’s parents said, also used it to shock their son and other students, branding their forearms with a cross-shaped welt.

I never thought about turning a spectroscopy demonstration into a weapon.

The ‘electrostatic device’ was apparently either a tesla coil or van de graaf generator. I’m a physics teacher now, and I don’t know how he managed to burn a cross onto someone, particularly against their will. Those instruments take some time to do any real damage, maybe 15-20 seconds to make a small burn (perhaps a minute for a small cross) with a tesla coil and dozens of long arcs in a carefully planned way to produce a patterned burn with a van de graaf. It would take half an hour or more all told, even if you planned ahead and all participants were willing. Additionally, anything that leaves a burn from either produces a small scar that lasts a while (I really like playing with electrostatic devices and I’ve burned myself from time to time.)

To make myself clear, I don’t support the guy. This type of thing (religion being forced on kids in the classroom) goes on all too often in small town America and those who complain get squashed by the higherups. However, keeping a Bible on your desk is NOT against the law, nor is it particularly onerous behavior, in my opinion. Having religious beliefs is the right of every person in the US, including teachers and students. What is not legal is when the government (via teachers in this case) uses that power to force religion on the public (students here.) If he was doing a daily Bible reading, that’s one thing, but if it was just there as his personal possession and not as a classroom tool, then it’s nobody’s business but his. Separation of church and state does not mean that religion is illegal in any arena that government is involved in, what it does mean is that the government can’t use its power to coerce us. If he DID manage to burn a cross into a kid’s arm intentionally, he should be resting his heels in a jail cell, plain and simple, and like the previous commenter, I’d go berserk if this were my daughter.

They were offended? If someone did that to one of my kids, I would be homicidal.

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-article.aspx?storyid=107654