Parenting & Family Quote by Patrick Buchanan

Buchanan’s line is less a complaint about biology class than a power claim about who gets to name reality. The loaded phrase “godless evolution” isn’t an argument; it’s a label designed to make a scientific framework sound like a moral assault. By stapling “godless” to “evolution,” he collapses method into metaphysics: teaching how species change becomes, in his telling, teaching children what to worship. That conflation is the point. It turns a curriculum debate into a culture-war emergency, where neutrality is recast as hostility.

The sentence also does something clever with authority. It opens with “Parents have a right,” invoking a sacred American language of liberty, family, and protection. That sets the listener up to treat any institutional pushback as bureaucrats trampling parental sovereignty. The demand that evolution “not be taught” isn’t framed as adding options (teach creationism too) but as subtraction: remove the offending idea. It’s censorship wrapped in rights talk, a familiar maneuver in populist politics.

Context matters: Buchanan rose as a prominent voice of late-20th-century social conservatism, when fights over school prayer, sex ed, and “values” were proxies for broader anxieties about secularization and shifting social hierarchies. His intent is mobilization, not pedagogy: to make public schools the front line in a struggle for national identity, with children cast as the contested territory. In that framing, the classroom becomes less a place to learn and more a place to defend.