GOP wants its own brand of indoctrination

When I attended Perkins Elementary in Des Moines in the middle 1960s, we began every school day standing at attention for reveille played through the school PA. We then pledged allegiance to the flag. Our teachers assured us the United States was the richest, most powerful nation on Earth. We were told, "The policeman is your friend." In music classes, we sang Christmas carols every year.

I stopped pledging the flag when I was thirteen because I opposed U.S. military intervention in Vietnam: I simply stood silently. Our eighth-grade history teacher screened the CIA-sponsored animated film "Animal Farm" along with 1950s-era anti-communist propaganda. She wondered if Chilean president Salvador Allende would peacefully surrender power, something she assured us no "Marxist" had ever done. Allende was killed in a 1973 coup by the Chilean military.

There is no irony when right-wingers denounce "indoctrination" in public schools. They want schools to "indoctrinate" students with their (to borrow a phrase from George Orwell) "smelly orthodoxies." Iowa Republicans have obviously never heard of the U.S. Supreme Court decision West Virginia v. Barnette. The Court ruled requiring students to pledge the flag violated their First Amendment rights. The Barnette girls refused to recite the pledge because it violated their Jehovah's Witnesses belief against "idolatry."

Iowa Republicans need to end their ignorance of the law and what is just and stop pandering to the petty resentments of their party base. Govern for all of us, not just the fanatics.

Jeff Klinzman

Coralville