WASHINGTON-- On August 22, 1978, the federal government launched its long-anticipated offensive against private education in America.

That day, there appeared in the Federal Register a new "revenue procedure" promulgated by the IRS.

Under the procedure, any schools including religious schools, established or expanded when federal courts were handing down integration orders must now prove that they are not havens of white flight.

Some 3,500 private, parochial and religious schools-- many of them in the South-- are on the chopping block. If they do not demonstrate that they have been racially integrated, they will lose their tax exemption. Contributions to these schools will cease to be tax-deductible.

The burden of proof will be shifted from the bureaucracy onto the schools themselves. Among the acceptable proofs are affirmative action programs for hiring minority teachers, special scholarships for minority students, and racial ratios in the student body that meet the approval of the IRS.

The so-called "segregation academies" established everywhere that some judge has handed down an integration order or busing decision have long been Public Enemy No.1 at the IRS.

But this new "procedure" is a new departure. And its implications are sweeping. If allowed to stand, every private school in the country can be threatened with loss of its tax exemption if it does not conform with the social values of the secular humanism which is the newly established religion in the United States.

The freedom, the individuality, of every private school in America—be it non-denominational, Jewish, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic or atheist—is threatened by the IRS procedure.

The camel’s nose is inside the tent. If the procedure is allowed to stand, not only private schools but also private clubs, churches and charitable organizations will become subject to snoops from the IRS.

If the taxmen can order an acceptable black-white ratio in a Baptist school in Alabama, what is to prevent them from ordering an acceptable girl-boy ratio in a military school in Pennsylvania?

How would an organization like the Jaycees respond if the IRS threatened it with loss of tax exemption if it failed to adopt an outreach program to bring in Hispanics and women?

Presumably, freedom in this society means the freedom to behave in one’s private associations in a manner which Andy Young might find offensive or Gloria Steinem might consider chauvinist. But if the IRS has its way, all the varied institutions of society will be made to conform with the ideological preferences of Jerome Kurtz, commissioner of the IRS.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has called for public hearings, congressional intervention and a return to the status quo—i.e., before any tax exemption is lifted from a private school, the IRS mist prove the school guilty of active discrimination.

If the church has no role in public education, then the state ought to keep its grubby paws off religious and private schools.

What the IRS is up to is not difficult to see.

Envy and hatred of private and religious schools was evident in the bureaucratic panic over the tuition tax credit. The nation’s public schools—many of them made Saharas of learning by bureaucrats, judges and the educational industry—cannot stand the competition and contrast with private and religious schools.

So, the state wishes to see them either destroyed or turned into the same social laboratories they have made of the public schools. It would be interesting to have the observations of the born-again Christian in the White House on this federal intrusion into religious education.

On Friday, October 13, IRS issued a News Release which will appear in the Federal Register on Oct. 18. It states that public hearings will be held on December 5 including up to 3 days of hearings.

Those wishing to speak in person at the hearings should send their request to the IRS by October 23rd. [An outline of the oral comments and time they wish to be devoted submitted by November 20th.] Each person will be limited to 10 minutes, however, not including the question and answer period.

"How does our land mourn under the over-flowings of ungodliness! What villainies of every kind are committed everyday; yea, too often with impunity by those who sin with a high hand, and glory in their shame! Who can reckon up all the oaths, curses, profanity, blasphemy, the lying, slandering, evil-speaking; the gluttony, drunkenness, revenge; the whoredoms, adulteries; the frauds, oppressions, extortions which overspread our land as a flood? How much anger and pride; how much sloth and idleness; how much softness, and effeminacy; how much luxury and self-indulgence; how much covetousness and ambition; how much thirst of praise; how much love of the world is to be found! And shall not the Lord judge such a nation as this? Yea, we know hot how soon He may say to the sword, ‘Sword, go through the land!’

-John Wesley

They Want Your Children!!

By slow degrees, the issue of "child development" is inching its way again into the headlines.

The child developers nearly won the ball game in the early ’70s, getting a bill adopted in both the U.S House and Senate. An outcry from protesting parents, however, brought a veto from President Nixon. Since that time, efforts to get a full-scale "child development" bill through Congress have languished, although promoters of the concept have continued pushing elements of it here and there.

The "child development" notion sounds innocuous on the surface, which seems to be the general idea. As usually presented, legislation on this topic contains some harmless-sounding verbiage about "diagnostic" services, day care for working mothers, recreational programs,

improvements in early education and the like - none of which seems very menacing. It is only when one probes beneath the surface that the nature of the problem is apparent.

Deuteronomy-6:6-9

What emerges most vividly from a close examination of this issue is the animus of the child developers towards the traditional family. There seems little doubt that this particular crusade is part and parcel of the role-reversal movement observable in the "equal rights" campaign and other fashionable crusades. The most obvious point of connection, perhaps, is that the network of federally funded day-care centers provided by such bills can take over the traditional role of the mother, permitting women to enter the job market on a full-fledged basis.

The flip side of this provision, of course, is that whoever controls the day-care centers can also assume the shaping and molding role in the life of the child traditionally undertaken by its parents. It is noteworthy in this respect that H.R. 2505, a child development bill that is currently pending in the House, defines a child’s "parent" as "any person who has day-to-day responsibility for a child or children," which would seem to mean, in the day-care concept, that the federal government or its agents can effectively become the child’s parent.

If this seems farfetched, consider the fact that in Sweden and other collectivist societies, the day-care, child-development approach has been used to wean children away from traditional notions of religious belief and family allegiance to complete reliance on the secular state. By this device, the collectivist regime assumes responsibility for shaping the psyche of the child - according to designs preferred by the official planners.

Consider also the provision of H.R. 2505 which says that the officially sponsored and federally funded "child development"

programs to be established by this act shall provide such services

"as are necessary for the full cognitive, emotional and physical development of the child." That seems to cover the waterfront on the subject, and the resemblance to what has happened in Sweden and other collectivist lands is readily apparent.

All of which makes it the more disturbing to note that the child developers continue to push their program on a variety of fronts. In several states, efforts are afoot to set up implementing machinery that can put the "child development" plan into effect once it is adopted by the Congress. Ohio already has an Office of Children, as does Virginia on a more modest basis. In Missouri, bills were introduced in this year’s legislative session to set up machinery that would interlock with pending federal legislation.

At the federal level, meantime, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) has been conducting hearings on the "child development" concept, augmented funds have been voted for related federal services and a White House Conference on the Family is planned for 1979- all familiar signs of a legislative push to come. The child developers, in other words, are still among us, working hard toward their objectives.

-- M. Stanton Evans, "Global Fare

Because 30 boys and only 2 girls were spanked in the Bellevue, Washington elementary schools during the 1975-1976 school year, the federal government has ordered the school to spank an equal number of girls.

My reaction is, "You must be kidding!" No, it’s true, says Mr. Dennis Carmichael, superintendent of schools for Bellevue. In addition, he said, the government has ordered the school to put girls in the boys

chorus. (There is a girl’s chorus.) And if the schools don’t comply? Then good ol’ Uncle Sam will withhold $1 million in federal aid.

This is in line with the unisex approach to publishing recently confirmed by two of America’s textbook publishers-McGraw-Hill and Scott, Foresman According to their spokesman, books of the future will be written in unisex style. In a recent pamphlet they warn, "Instructional materials should never imply that all women have a mother instinct or that the emotional life of a family suffers because a mother works. Both men and women should be shown engaged in home maintenance activities, ranging from cooking and house cleaning to washing the car and making household repairs. Sometimes the man should be shown preparing the meals, doing the laundry, and diapering the baby, while the woman builds bookcases or takes out the trash."

A list of "no-no words includes "poetess, Jewess, authoress, and co-ed. Rather than "manpower" writers are to say "human power." Housewives are to be called consumers or shoppers. And since the English language lacks a pronoun signifying both "he" and "she", sentences are to be rewritten to eliminate the pronoun. In some texts, the letter "e" or "i" is to be used rather than the "he" or "she".

And someone else has suggested that rather than the usual Mr., Mrs., or Ms. we adopt a totally new form of address with an Mx. This editor says "Hogwash and bilgewater!!"

--Robert Billings, Christian School Alert, Washington, D. C. September 1978