I've more or less given up talk radio --not for Lent, but just because we're in a slow news cycle and no one has anything to say. But I just tuned in to Hannity to keep myself company as I was doing dishes, and he's still going on about Jay Bennish, the foolish Colorado High School teacher. I think that's exactly where I came in last week. Snooze.
If there were justice and common sense in the world, he'd have been fired for preaching his Moorean politics in a geography class, so don't think I'm defending him. But listening to the excerpts from his class, he sounds less like a dangerous ideologue to me than just an ultimately harmless moron. Exactly like any number of exceedingly foolish teachers my classmates and I endured throughout school. If you were going to fire every history/social science/civics teacher I ever had who didn't have a clue about or outright hated America, that would be precisely all of them without exception until I hit college --and I went to a unique school in that regard, or matters would have been worse there.
We had a "Morality" teacher in (Catholic) high school who helpfully explained that what Hitler did wasn't wrong in conscience because he sincerely believed it (Teach wasn't much for upholding any of Church teaching or the Commandments at all, in fact); History teachers who routinely worked denunciation of Reagan and his policies into their lectures; a Social Justice class that was little more than Marxist propaganda. The "danger" of these teachers is not that anything they say sticks, but that they put kids off higher education because they make it seem so foolish and irrelevant.