So disturbing.
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
So I went to high school in Ohio with this nice Polish-Italian gal, Michele, who married this guy Dave Daubenmire, who has, in the name of radically fundamental “christian family values”, dragged his family through one embarrassing abomination after another.
There was Coach Dave’s (he was once allowed to coach football at a small Ohio high school) forced, mandatory prayer in the locker room. There was the campaign for bringing churchiness forcefully back into, on top of, and generally obliterating the state. There were his rabid radio shows, and the preaching/protesting at gay pride marchers, and being “in overdrive for the lord”, well, since he lost his last teaching job. There’s his website (nah, no link), filled with connections to groups who want nothing less than a new holy war, a new crusade, a revolution that will replace government with their version of christianity.
He sells coaches’ caps with a cross on them. He is so anti-abortion he says it’s “hedonistic, pagan, and demonic”—and then he really gets started. A woman’s right to choose is incomprehensible to him, and his other written attitudes about women fall into line with the precept that he is the king of his marriage and his family. Terrorism in the womb leads to terrorism in the world. The Constitution never mentions the separation of church and state, he thinks. Income taxes are illegal. Gays make him sick. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama is one of his heroes. The ACLU is…well, you get the idea.
And finally, last year, there was their son, a teacher like his parents, caught with child pornography on his computer. And so I’ve seen Michele’s name, and that of the rest of their family, dragged down through the arrogance of this guy who is just the latest to have the direct line to the Lord’s plan for America.
And just when I thought maybe they would stay out of the headlines, an apparent buddy of his in Mount Vernon, Ohio is now all over the news for, well, teaching Christianity in science class, teaching creationism, and offering extra credit if students went to see the anti-evolution film “Expelled.”
Here’s the Columbus Dispatch article, and an AP report adds:
Freshwater’s friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.
“With the exception of the cross-burning episode. … I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district,” he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.
Freshwater used a science tool known as a high-frequency generator to burn images of a cross on students’ arms in December, the report said. Freshwater told investigators he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an “X,” not a cross. But pictures show a cross, the report said.
Other findings show that Freshwater taught that carbon dating was unreliable to argue against evolution.
Daubenmire is going to make the rounds of Fox News (his web site says) and defend his friend and talk about the values of his corner of small-town Ohio, which he claims to be uniquely in touch with. Well, sure. Gotta sell those ballcaps with crosses.
His wife and I went to school together, were co-editors of the school paper. We could not now be further politically and philosophically apart, it seems.
How does that happen, exactly?
