If they don’t nip this in the bud, what’s next? Children thinking for themselves? [shudder]

This week, a spokeswoman for Utah’s Republic, a group that advocates for a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, asked the Alpine Board of Education to scrap its democracy-centered mission statement. The issue has sparked a dust-up over the past month, garnering petition signatures from hundreds of Alpine parents and a rebuke of the school board by the Provo Daily Herald’s editorial board.

Alpine’s mission statement is “Educating all students to ensure the future of our democracy.”

But this nation is a republic, not a democracy, said Oak Norton, a Highland father of five and the founder of Utah’s Republic. The Constitution guarantees every state a “republican form of government.” “Karl Marx said, ‘Democracy is the road to socialism,’ ” Norton said. A true democracy, he said, relies solely on majority rule and inevitably devolves into anarchy, which then sprouts socialist dictators.
[…]
Susan Schnell, a Highland mother of five, became alarmed when she visited the district’s professional development center and saw the phrase “Enculturating the young into a social and political democracy.”
[…]
Schnell also found a link from the school district’s mission statement online to an essay, “America: Republic or Democracy?” that she found offensive. She sent an e-mail to other parents and many of them protested the essay, which refers to the nation’s founders as “predatory elite” who chose the republic form of government to maintain control over slaves and those with less socioeconomic clout.

Parents also were troubled by other works by the essay’s author, William P. Meyers, including “Vampires or Gods,” a satire about the possibility that Jesus and other deities were really vampires.