At townhall.com (home of the execrable Pat Buchanan and a host of other deranged throwbacks), we find religious fanatic Terry Jeffrey (editor-in-chief of the religious right propaganda site CNS News) openly calling for the destruction of the public school system: Do Wisconsin’s Public Schools Deserve to Survive?

With the entire nation watching, Wisconsinites are now debating whether the state’s public school teachers ought to be required to pay 5.8 percent of their wages to support their own retirement plans and 12.6 percent of their own health-insurance premiums, and also whether their union ought to be able to negotiate a pay increase on their behalf that exceeds the rate of inflation without letting voters approve or disapprove that raise in a referendum.

What Wisconsin ought to be debating is whether these public school teachers should keep their jobs at all.

Then every state ought to follow Wisconsin in the same debate.

It is time to drive public schools out of business by driving them into an open marketplace where they must directly compete with schools not run by the government or staffed by members of parasitic public employees’ unions.

The well-documented incompetence of America’s public schools — including Wisconsin’s — is damaging our nation. Their educational product is simply not good enough for our children. In some cases, it is toxic.

Ugh. And if you need to know where this nutjob is headed, here’s the money graf:

In addition to being less expensive and better than public schools at teaching math and reading, Catholic schools — like any private schools — can also teach students that there is a God, that the Ten Commandments are true and must be followed, that the Founding Fathers believed in both and that, ultimately, American freedom depends on fidelity to our Judeo-Christian heritage even more than it depends on proficiency in reading and math.

That’s right — he puts religious indoctrination above reading and math.

Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.