Amazon.com: Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!: Books: Katharine DeBrecht,Jim Hummel

Do you find this disturbing? No it's not a parody.

Book Description
This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

And...

From the Publisher
Would you let your child read blatantly liberal stories with titles such as "King & King;" "No, George, No;" or "It's Just a Plant?"

Unless you live in Haight-Ashbury or write for the New York Times, probably not. But with the nation's libraries and classrooms filled with overtly liberal children's books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use, kids everywhere are being deluged with left-wing propaganda.

"Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" is the book conservative parents have been seeking. This illustrated book -- the first in the "Help! Mom!" series from Kids Ahead -- is perfect for parents who seek to share their traditional values with their children, as well as adults who wish to give a humorous gift to a friend.

Praised by Rush Limbaugh and hailed as "the answer to a baseball mom's prayers" by talk radio host Melanie Morgan, this book has already been the subject of coverage in The Wall Street Journal and Harper's magazine. Written by a self-proclaimed "Security Mom for Bush" and featuring hilarious full-color illustrations by a Reuben Award winning artist, it is certain to be one of the most talked about children's books of the year.

Here, let me riff on a theme by Richard Dawkins. He said that it should "grate like fingernails on a chalkboard" when one hears the terms "christian child" or "muslim child" etc. And that essentially there were no such things except christian and muslim parents.

This is, of course, not to say that young teenagers cannot hold convictions, much less religious ones, but it's worth question why we don't hear terms such as "liberal child" or "conservative child" or "Kantian child" or "marxist child" the same way we do when it is prefaced by a some religious adjectives. If we do not think that any child (beyond some wildly precocious ones) are capable of understanding what it means to be liberal or conservative, in what manner do we think them capable of believing in Thor of the Abramahic god or what patheon of dieties their parents believe in?

No where else in our constitution do we find the right specifically reserved by default that children adopt the religion that their parents have chosen.

I probably won't go as far as to call religious indoctrination (let's not lie, it's indoctrination whether it be religious or secular values, but if it really hurts your feelings, let's call it instilling values alright?) child abuse because it's not impossible for the kid to grow up and cast off the vestiges of faith (no "reasonable faith" is an oxymoron, it is not acceptance on the basis of experience or evidence).

But nevertheless, it's time for us to take stock of what exactly is happening in the name of religion and to cast it alongside any other worldview and stop ascribing something automatically positive to it. That should be at the very minimum be a start.

Peace