This story is from the Chicago Tribune. (H/T ECM, The Way the Ball Bounces)

Excerpt:

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: “Do you see the situation?”

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

[…]Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

[…]At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.

“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”

One thing you have to understand about the secular left. They don’t like the idea that people are different. They want everyone to be “equal”. They want everyone to drive the same kind of car, live in the same kind of house, and especially to be forced to attend the same public schools. They don’t want anyone to be better or worse at anything, no matter how hard they try. Forcing all the children to have the same food for breakfast and lunch is their way of making all the children equal. If you’ve seen the movie “The Incredibles”, the secular left are like the annoying cry-babies who sue the super heroes for being super until the super heroes go underground. Progressives think that should be no freedom to be different, because that might make someone else feel bad.

Having the school provide generic meals also a way of marginalizing fathers, I think. One of the things that fathers really like, I am told, is feeding their children. Dads get a big kick out of buying things for their family to eat. By taking over the father’s role as provider, the school is making fathers unnecessary. When fathers don’t have a special role in the home, they tune out of the family. When fathers are forced to share their responsibilities with the state, it diminishes their prestige and authority in the home. When government takes over the role of men, the men who were good at those roles are no longer sought after. And all the money they make by working hard is just gobbled up by the government and redistributed – which makes them less able to to marry and raise their own families.

Liberty and Equality

To read a really excellent explanation of what I’ve tried to explain clumsily above, read my previous post on liberty (equality of OPPORTUNITY) and equality (equality of OUTCOMES). I reference a couple of articles by Jewish thinker Dennis Prager. He really explains it well. You can have liberty, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. So long as there is freedom, people will do different things. What the secular left wants is to destroy liberty, so that everyone will be the same.

By the way, The Way the Ball Bounces is a great blog. You should bookmark it.