Read anything Stephen Henderson has written over the past year and you will be hard pressed to find a single piece where he is not crying about some injustice either he or his fellow black man has suffered. Anyone who reads his whiny drivel for more than a couple of months will likely need some sort of therapy to keep them from wanting to jump off the nearest ledge on a tall building. Henderson is a perfect example of the wussification of the male in the United States. We’ve met and spoken with him before. Henderson is not embarrassed to say he’s a hardened liberal. He blames it on his U of D Catholic High School education. He claims they “pumped liberalism and social justice through his veins.” As a Catholic, I find this type of rhetoric gut-wrenching, irresponsible and the furthest thing from the type of love and compassion for my neighbor I learned as a young Catholic. 

If representatives of working citizens who live in the suburbs of Detroit, refuse to burden them with hundreds of millions of tax dollars to bail out the failed Detroit Public Schools (yet again), Stephen Henderson says they should be murdered.

Stephen Henderson, the Pulitzer prize-winning editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press has called for the murder of Michigan lawmakers with whom he disagrees.

The reason? The lawmakers voted for legislation that would give parents more choices to avoid Michigan’s failing public schools. Detroit’s public schools are failing academically and nearly insolvent, the New York Times wrote in January. The Detroit News wrote in March that “the statewide opinion of K-12 education is downright ugly.” That poll showed residents didn’t think throwing money at public-union-controlled schools was the answer, with 63 percent saying it takes more than money to improve education.

Yesterday Michigan’s Republican legislators voted to bail out Detroit’s abysmally run schools with $617 million in taxpayer funding. The same bill also fought efforts to constrain charter school choices in Detroit. Prior to the vote, Stephen Henderson wrote on his editorial page:

We really ought to round up the lawmakers who took money to protect and perpetuate the failing charter-school experiment in Detroit, sew them into burlap sacks with rabid animals, and toss them into the Straits of Mackinac.

That’s harsh. Maybe.

But isn’t that what the Romans or Greeks or some other early practitioners of democracy used to do with solicitous and unprincipled public officials?

And this legislation that passed the state House of Representatives Thursday night, the one that bows to the thoroughly debunked theory that a free-for-all, market-based approach to public schooling will produce quality choices for Detroit parents?

It is garbage.

It is bought-and-paid-for work product from a legislative body whose leader, the maladroit thinker Kevin Cotter, has sold his caucus’ political soul to the high-bidding DeVos family and other charter advocates and told himself it’s about belief, not money.

In the most crass terms, the House of Representatives is telling parents in Detroit that the best we deserve is what we have now. Public schools that have been underfunded and torn asunder by depopulation and corruption. Charters opening and closing willy-nilly, many to profit off the traditioal public schools’ misery, but offering alternatives in name only to the public schools they claim to outperform. The bragging that charter advocates do about the sliver of daylight between the outcomes of charters and traditional public schools would be roll-on-the-floor funny if it weren’t so condescending, and it it didn’t heartily embrace the idea of calcified inequality.

It is every bit deserving of an old-school retributive response.

A sack. An animal. A lake.

No lover of actual democracy could weep at that outcome.

Stephen Henderson’s tweeted his Detroit Free Press article and added this disgusting commentary:

 

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