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Donate Online | July 29, 2010 | Printer-Friendly Version |
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Local Hallmarks will not stock gay marriage cardsThe Idaho Affiliate of the American Family Association
Monday, August 25, 2008
Bryan Fischer, Executive Director
LOCAL HALLMARK STORES WON’T STOCK GAY MARRIAGE CARDS
Great news on the culture front! The owners of the seven local Hallmark stores, which all go by the name “Jordan’s Hallmark,” will not stock the corporation’s newly developed homosexual-marriage greeting cards.
The owners live here in the valley, and in a phone conversation this morning with me, they made it clear that they would not stock the
 card in any case because of their personal values, which are shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition.They were blindsided by Hallmark on this rollout, and had no idea the cards were coming until they read about in the newspapers.
Realize that if gay activists get their way, and introduce "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" protections into Idaho law, these owners could be sued for discrimination for their conscience-driven decision not to sell pro-gay greeting cards.
The best thing IVA supporters can do at this point is to make sure we buy our next special occasion card at a Jordan's Hallmark. They've felt the pinch of the slowdown in the economy like everyone else, and are also up against some big box stores which also carry Hallmark cards.
Let's make it a "buycott" instead of a boycott, and show our support for local businessmen who are committed to doing the right thing. Be sure to thank the staff for the store's stand when you make your purchase; they will pass on your word of encouragement to the owners.
In an IVA action alert last Thursday, we asked you to call a local Hallmark store to urge the owner not to put the cards in his stores, and you responded. Conversations with that manager on Thursday and Friday indicated that the phone had not stopped ringing.
Thank you for your response to our action alert! Together, when the pro-family community takes simple steps to make our voice heard, we can make a difference in the battle for the heart and soul of our culture.
ATTEND PREMIERE OF “FLUNKED” TOMORROW NIGHT
A sneak preview of an excellent new documentary on education choice and education reform, “Flunked,” will be offered tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. at the Northgate Reel Theater in Boise, at 6950 W. State St. (near the intersection of Glenwood and State streets.)
This sneak preview is free. If you’d like to be sure to get a seat, the IVA has arranged for 40 complimentary tickets for the premiere, available to the first
 40 who respond to this email. Let me know how many tickets you’d like – just hit “Reply” - and pick them up from me at the entrance to the Northgate theater between 6:30 and 6:50 p.m. tomorrow night.Nampa Classical Academy (NCA) is co-sponsoring the premiere along with KBOI 670 AM, and Nate Shelman will do a live broadcast of his KBOI talk show from the Northgate Reel Theater from 4-7 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. Be sure to call the program at 336-3700 to share your own observations about school choice and education reform in Idaho.
The documentary is narrated by award winning actor Joe Mantegna, and Executive Producer Steve Maggi will be in attendance for the Q & A session which will follow the screening of the film.
The NCA will open next fall as a public charter school, but it will be fashioned after the Hillsdale Academy Educational Model, which was developed by Hillsdale College in Michigan, one of the leading conservative colleges in the United States. The model features a traditional, classical, value-centered curriculum.
We’re familiar by now with one report after another of the dismal performance of traditional government schools. The way out and the way forward? Two simple words: choice and competition.
Idaho’s public policy with regard to public education should be simple: dollars should follow the child to the school of the parents’ choice, whether public, private or homeschool, with no strings attached.
Parents love their children more than anyone else in the world and are in the best place to decide which educational option is best for them. Empowering parents with the maximum range of choices will rapidly improve education in Idaho, as traditional public schools will be forced to offer a better product to persuade parents to keeping parking their kids there.
We’re told by many on the left that monopolies are evil – unless we’re talking about our system of public education, in which case apparently a government-run, teachers’-union-driven monopoly is just fine, thank you very much.
 “Flunked” profiles a number of creative approaches to educational reform in America, especially focusing on the burgeoning charter school movement. Home school gets an approving nod, with a profile of the home-educated student who won the 2007 national geography bee.
The Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy and its principal, Bill Proser, are prominently featured in the film. Mr. Proser has chosen to affiliate with the Northwest Professional Educators association (NWPE) rather than the Idaho Education Association. While the IEA spends teachers’ dues on a host of left-leaning political causes, the NWPE does not, reserving its efforts exclusively for educational improvement and liability protection for teachers.
Idaho law currently limits the number of charter schools which can open in any one year to just six, and the process is so cumbersome that just one or two charter schools are starting each year.
Arizona, which passed its charter school law about the same time that Idaho did, now has 500 charter schools while Idaho limps along with 28. Clearly part of the solution to educational challenges in Idaho is to make it easier for charter schools to start and to remove the artificially imposed cap on the number of startups.
I hope to see you tomorrow night, as we continue to work on making educational history in Idaho!
WALL STREET JOURNAL: “PROTECT OUR KIDS FROM PRESCHOOL”
We will certainly see another effort from the education establishment next year to force you and me to pay for pre-K programs in Idaho, which truly are little more than taxpayer-funded day care. Sen. Barack Obama is sponsoring his “Zero-to-Five” initiative, in which he pledges to pump billions of dollars into early childhood education.
A Friday column in the Wall Street Journal reveals, however, that preschool is virtually worthless academically and dangerous socially.
The WSJ points out that attendance at U.S. preschools has jumped from 16% a half-century ago to nearly 70% today. But by the end of the 3rd grade,
 cognitive gains have virtually disappeared. Fourth-grade reading, science and math scores have remained stagnant since the early 1970s.Oklahoma and Georgia both adopted universal pre-K a decade or more ago. Oklahoma has actually lost ground since embracing universal pre-K, with its fourth and eighth graders testing lower now than they did in 1992. Georgia’s program has made no difference in its fourth-grade reading scores.
The 40-year-old federal preschool program Head Start is no better. Although studies show early gains, in later years Head Start kids become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids.
Finland routinely outperforms the U.S., but their kids don’t even begin formal education until they are 7 (it’s worth noting that Idaho’s compulsory education law doesn’t kick in until age 7).
Further, research done by Stanford and UC Berkeley in 2005 revealed that preschool may actually do lasting harm to children. Researchers found that kindergartners who spent more than 15 hours in preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. A Quebec study found that preschool kids showed a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills than their non-preschool peers.
Concludes the WSJ: “Kids with loving and attentive parents – the vast majority – might be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize separation between toddlers and parents.”
BIAS AT MCCLATCHY? NOPE, NO BIAS HERE
The McClatchy news service finally got around to doing a piece on the GOP’s informal
 “rump” sessions to protest Democratic obstructionism on opening the outer continental shelf to drilling. Its feature piece, for Idaho consumption, was on Rep. Mike Simpson, who didn’t joint the effort until last week, and then only at the behest of House Minority Leader John Boehner. Meanwhile, Rep. Bill Sali, who has been a part of the protest since the beginning, has sponsored tax-credit legislation which will give consumers immediate relief from high energy prices, and who was selected by his peers in the House to deliver their weekly national radio address last week, barely rated a mention. Nope, no bias here.
IVA IN THE NEWS:
A generous donor has offered $5,000 in matching funds for every gift given in the month of August. Here’s a chance to double the value of your contribution! For every August donation of $100 or more, the IVA will send a complimentary copy of a powerful documentary which supports Intelligent Design theory, “Unlocking the Mystery of Life.” Information on how to donate, including online, may be found here. Together we can make Idaho the friendliest place in the world to raise a family! Thank you! BONUS BYTES
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v. Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council, Blake “identified himself as a pro-life Democrat and blatantly challenged his party’s historic position on abortion.” The room fell “uneasily silent,” according to Schenck, as Blake spoke against abortion. Idaho has one lone pro-life Democratic legislator, Rep. Branden Durst of Boise.(
Wade, and has made support for it a litmus test for any nominee to the Supreme Court (pro-abortionists apparently can have litmus tests, but pro-lifers can’t). He claims to support abortion because, as he put it, “I don’t think I have the right to impose my view” on others, apparently oblivious to the fact that Roe allows 1.2 million women to impose their views on unborn babies every year. Biden wants U.S. dollars spent to fund abortions overseas, wants abortions performed at overseas U.S. military installations, and got a 0% rating from National Right to Life for 2007-2008. Biden led the fight against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court 21 years ago, making it an even higher priority at that time than the looming presidential campaign.(
er – they too were born that way. After all, gays tell us we can’t control our passions – so, says Tallman, “my passionate anti-gayness must also be impossible to control.” If it’s unhealthy to suppress our innate desires, then certainly it must be unhealthy to suppress “the seemingly irresistible urge to espouse my views on sexual ethics.” Regarding the “twins study,” it seems that in homes where one twin opposes homosexuality, so does the other, to an impressive degree. “If I inherited this from my parents, well, who can blame me for that?” And why, he says, would I choose to be this way, since “I have been ridiculed, called intolerant and fired from an academic post for my beliefs on this subject? ... Since no rational person in the United States in 2008 would choose to be anti-gay if he didn’t have to be, it must not be a choice.” Tallman concludes, “I know this column might frustrate some people who will resist seeing how their arguments, if true, have helped me embrace my own unfashionable alternative beliefstyle. But that’s okay. I don’t blame people who criticize me. Thanks to their insights, I’ve also come to realize that their homophobophobia (sic) probably isn’t a choice either.”(
nts already in the U.S. is not to round them up and deport them en masse (a view we’ve never advocated) but rather simply to aggressively enforce existing immigration law, which will in time result in the self-deportation of illegals. According to Fox News, it’s working already. Illegals are returning home to Mexico in numbers not seen for decades, which paradoxically may create the same crush on social services for the Mexican government that their presence has created here. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. dropped by 11 percent over the last year, due to an estimated 1.3 million illegal aliens returning to their home countries. (