I guess I never gave much thought to the word liberal, but now that it’s become a bad word, I’m looking more closely.One of its definitions is generous, and for me that fits. Magnanimous, kindly, open-handed, and benevolent. If you have disdain for the word liberal, you may as well stop reading now, sorry, but I’m here to defend it with every fiber of my being, sometimes even offensively.

Right now the word woke is pretty much the same thing, and I have no problem with thinking of people who are liberal or who have liberal views as awake or woke up, as in aware. So, we liberals are awake and generous–generous with our compassion, with our tolerance for difference, and with people and animals who are less fortunate than we are or who are in need of a handout or a hand up. How did that get to be a bad thing? It doesn’t even feel counter to anything Jesus was teaching and preaching.

So, I suppose liberal arts colleges or ones with a strong liberal arts department are being targeted (bribed really) to stop teaching a liberal curriculum–ones that look at the diverse world with a desire to understand it, not condemn it. Ones that look at the world with curiosity rather than disapproval. Ones that want to learn from other cultures, not pronounce them wrong.

If we are appalled at the actions of our ancestors at certain times in history, we don’t want to pretend that time didn’t happen. We don’t want to ignore their abhorrant behavior. Instead we want to understand both what forces led to those people doing what they did in that time. We want to acknowledge it and learn from it, not to punish ourselves or feel bad about out country, but so we can hope to avoid anything like that happening again.

In other words, the liberal agenda requires us to use our minds. To be smart. To examine and analyze, to use reason to make decisions based on knowledge, not belief and feeling. Liberal thinking doesn’t care if you want to pray over something, but don’t use prayer in place of facts. If students believe that they can pray their way to a good test score instead of learning the material, they don’t belong in college. And if parents believe that students are being brainwashed because they hear about issues from every point of view, even unconventional ones, they are mistaken. It’s called education. It’s not always comfortable, but it makes you wiser.

It’s true that I don’t believe Noah took two of every creature in the world (even at that time) and put them on a boat and saved them from a flood. I don’t think of the Bible as a reference book, nor a textbook It’s a book of tales told first in Hebrew by men wandering in the desert, without women but with wine stored in goatskins. Then those tales were interpreted many times by many people. Allegory is not reality. Lots of valuable lessons are there, but probably no more than Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Toni Morrison. Diversity is enriching.

Whether you pray or not is none of my concern. It’s between you and your god and it has no place in an institute of higher learning, whether that institute is Kindergarten or college. Why is thinking for yourself being targeted as a bad thing? Here’s why: Because the current administration doesn’t want thinkers, he wants followers, people who have blind faith in him, not people who are looking critically and thoughtfully at his actions and words and finding something (maybe everything) wrong with him.

I will freely admit that I don’t pray. That shouldn’t bother anyone who does pray any more than your praying bothers me. When someone tells me they will pray for me, I say, Thank you, and I mean it. Why does the fact that I find religion’s foundation to be based on superstition bother anyone? I’m not asking them to see it my way, but I have to put up with prayer in schools. Aren’t there plenty of churches in most towns?

Schools are for objective learning., for giving children the facts and the details so that they can make their own decisions, not telling them what they have to believe. If education is failing kids today (and I have a feeling there’s some truth to that), it’s not because there is no prayer. If anything, it might have to do with the trend toward a child-centered society, and something is missing from the once-upon-a-time edict that students must be respectful toward teachers. But that’s another ioece of writing for another time and too deep for my brain today.

I’ll let William Shakespeare have the last word:

Namaste