All My Gettings

Don't get me wrong. I'm just as much against world peace and mutual understanding across cultures as the next guy. Oh, and championing health care for the devastatingly poor and asserting the rights of women and children is for sissies, clearly. So I totally get why Utah State Senator Margaret Dayton is opposed to funding International Baccalaureate programs with their support for the "U.N. agenda". I'm not making this up. Those are her exact words (see here).

This is the sort of argument that no one could see coming. I mean, it'd be fine to say that the IB program unfairly singles out gifted children, or is a waste of school funds when there's a robust AP program. I have no problem with those, logically, as I obviously have problems with them politically. But to call the entire program anti-American? How do you respond to that? I wonder if it's the word Baccalaureate that's got this woman so freaked out. That sounds French, right? And we all know the French are the most anti-American people in the world. The number of French terrorists is staggering, really.

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Utah is, to my knowledge, the only state with a town that is formally, per ordinance, not part of the U.N. I think it'd be really funny to get some blue berets and fatigues and go strolling down the main drag of La Verkin sometime. Even better, I could get some Francophone friends to head down there and chat it up as we stroll.

While this is perhaps not the lowest point for the State Legislature (I think you'd be hard-pressed to top the argument from one Solon who claimed that city folks just don't get the pressures in rural life that lead to bestiality), I think it really shatters any hope you may have of Utah being, you know, normal. On the plus side, our kids will no longer be forced to learn about China in schools. Because, as we all know, that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.