A school bus driver, ferrying kids back to school after a field trip to a zoo, gave President Bush the finger as he rode by in his motorcade. Now she finds herself without a job.

Either she lost her job because she expressed a political opinion, or, as District spokeswoman Sara Niegowski claims:

"The bus driver was not terminated for making an obscene gesture at the president. The bus driver was terminated for making an obscene gesture in view of the students," Niegowski said. "That's not the role modeling we need for our students."

So we've reached the point where we not only censor the airwaves of sexually or violently explicit content, and words like "cunt" and "shit", but now a bus driver can have their livelihood fucked with because she's naive enough to think that she can get away with displaying a single offensive digit while her entire cargo of kids is most likely distracted by the fact that the most powerful man in the world is driving alongside them.

These people need to take a pill. Your kids aren't going to turn to dust because they hear a profanity. Their brains aren't going to rot to perversion because someone makes an "obscene" gesture. Playing violent video games isn't going to compel them to slit your throat in your sleep.

And here's a news flash: most kids don't hold their bus drivers in extremely high esteem, and aren't exactly the people they tend to look to as role-models. Yes, they are adults, and a kind of authority figure, but does anybody honestly think that the damage being done here merits taking food off the table of a person who's doing the necessary and thankless job of bussing kids to and from school?

This is an example of someone's warped view of "morality" run amok. A completely harmless, symbolic act precipitates a punishment that really does hurt someone. It is the result of pandering to people who can't govern their emotions where the welfare of their children are concerned. It's why we need to deny this idea of arbitrary moralizing (often arising from, or disseminated by organized religion) and start embracing an approach to ethics and morality that is grounded in science and logic -- which might sound cold and impractical to some, but in fact is a much more compassionate, fair and sensible way of dealing with the problems that unfortunately, humanity must face.