President Obama Weekly Address: Nation Continues to Grieve for the Shooting Victims in Connecticut Massacre

Janet, I have to disagree with you about what Mike Huckabee said regarding God being taking out of our schools. It was not a “shame” that Huckabee blamed the massacre on the absence of God in our classrooms. All you have to do is look at the behaviors of our students before prayer was removed from our schools in 1963 by the Supreme Court and the same measures of behaviors after prayer was removed. Some indisputable statistics tell us that the downward slide in behavior started about the time of the court decision and was very evidently related:

1. Since 1963 violent crime has increased 544%.
2. Illegal drugs have become an enormous & uncontrollable problem.
3. The nation has been deprived of an estimated 30 million citizens through legal abortions just since 1973.
4. Before 1963 divorce rates had been declining for 15 years. After 1963 divorces increased 300% each year for the next 15 years.
5. Since 1963 unmarried people living together is up 353%
6. Since 1963 single parent families are up 140%.
7. Since 1963 single parent families with children are up 160%.
8. For 15 years before 1963 pregnancies in girls ages 15 through 19 years had been no more than 15 per thousand After 1963 pregnancies increased 187% in the next 15 years.
9. For younger girls, ages 10 to 14 years, pregnancies since 1963 are up 553%.
10.Before 1963 sexually transmitted diseases among students were 400 per 100,000. Since 1963, they were up 226% in the next 12 years.
11.The educational standard of measure has been the SAT scores. SAT scores had been steady for many years before 1963. From 1963 they rapidly declined for 18 consecutive years, even though the same test has been used since 1941.
12.In 1974-75 the rate of decline of the SAT scores decreased, even though they continued to decline. That was when there was an explosion of private religious schools. There were only 1000 Christian schools in 1965. Between 1974 to 1984 they increased to 32,000.
a. That could have an impact if the private schools had higher SAT scores. In checking with the SAT Board it was found that indeed the SAT scores for private schools were nearly 100 points higher than public schools.
b. In fact the scores were at the point where the public schools had been before their decline started in 1963 when prayer and Bible reading/ instruction was removed from the schools.
c. The scores in the public schools were still declining.
13. Of the nation’s top academic scholars, three times as many come from private religious schools, which operate on one-third the funds as do the public schools.

Statistics prove you wrong, Janet. It is more a shame that we have taken God out of our schools and out of our society. And shame on you for failing to see this.