Whenever a Republican talks about "bipartisanship," it's bound to be something hateful and extreme. The latest efforts to shove unwanted vouchers down Washington, DC's throat is a rather blatant example of this. (Politico 1/24/11)

The day after President Barack Obama makes education a centerpiece of his State of the Union address, House Speaker John Boehner will try to force his hand on the issue of school vouchers in Washington, D.C. as a test of the White House’s commitment to bipartisanship.

The Ohio Republican, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), will introduce legislation on Wednesday to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, the speaker’s office said Monday, making a school voucher initiative that Democrats, including Obama, have strongly opposed as a bargaining chip for beginning discussions on the administration’s desired education proposals.

“If the president is sincere about working together on education reform, we should start by saving this successful, bipartisan program that has helped so many underprivileged children get a quality education,” Boehner said in a statement to POLITICO.

In 2001, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did an excellent expose debunking claims by the corporate media and militant Christian fundamentalists that vouchers improve educational achievement. Studies funded by voucher supports show know educational advantage in voucher schools despite the ability of those schools to weed out disruptive students and students with learning disabilities.

It just isn't honest to say that there is any educational benefit to vouchers.

Of course, vouchers were never intended for educational purposes and certainly aren't meant to help poor people. Rightists like Boehner and Lieberman are the types who derive enormous pleasure from the suffering of the poor and the accumulation by the rich. This initiative is all about religious indoctrination and erosion of the First Amendment.

Vouchers, like any government funding of religion, is absolutely forbidden by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Yet, in the one of the most dishonest Supreme Court rulings since Plessy vs. Ferguson, a 5-4 majority fraudulently claimed that the purpose of vouchers was educational and that government funding of blatant religious indoctrination is somehow "constitutional."

Eventually, that blatantly unconstitutional ruling allow vouchers will be overturned by a more honest Supreme Court. In the meantime, We the People will have to defend the Constitution from anti American extremists like Boehner and Lieberman.

The obvious unconstitutionality of vouchers legislation is hardly the only problem with voucher legislation. This is a rather transparent effort to discriminate against atheists and force us to participate in religion by forcing us to pay for it. Reprehensible bigots like the ones behind the vouchers legislation are obsessed with shoving religion down the throats of atheist Americans instead of treating us as the full citizens of this country which we are.

As bad as the bigotry is, there is something even worse about vouchers programs. They promote child molestation. The dollar amounts are deliberately set so that poor parents can not send their children to elite private schools, but instead to Roman Catholic schools. This puts far more children in the clutches of child raping priests. The irony of a moralizing gasbag like Lieberman doing something he knows damned well will result in the rape of more children is enough to give any reasonable person pause.