Over half a century since the U.S. Supreme Court unconstitutionally "cleansed" voluntary, non-sectarian prayer out of the socialized education system, and they're still at it. The devil's advocates really are indefatigeable (via Newsmax Insider):
An atheist group has sent letters to twenty-six school districts in Oklahoma demanding that they halt the "illegal" distribution of Bibles by the Gideons International.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) claims the schools are violating the U.S. Constitution by allowing the Christian group, known for placing Bibles in hotels around the world, to bring Bibles into classrooms, CNS News reported.
"It is unconstitutional for public school districts to permit the distribution of Bibles as part of the public school day," wrote Andrew Seidel, an attorney with the FFRF. "Courts have uniformly held that the distribution of Bibles to students in public schools is prohibited."
FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a release: "It's time for schools officials in Oklahoma to do their job, enforce the law, and protect students from the Gideons."
<sigh> Let's go through this again.
Amendment I to the United States Constitution states the following:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [emphases added]
1) The Establishment Clause prohibits the federal government, through its legislative branch as established in Article I, from establishing a national religion. It does not prohibit the "several States" from doing so, and in fact many of them at the time did have established religions (more like denominations) within their respective borders.
2) The contemporary analogue for a national religion in which fealty and membership was or could become mandatory was the Church of England, or the church/state amalgam that the Catholic Church had become in Europe for centuries. Quite obviously the Founders (the States) by way of their Constitutional Convention delegates (the Framers), did not intend for that definition to be so ludicrously stretched, like ecumenical taffy, as to require an official national anti-religion that effectively nullifies the Free Exercise Clause. They would have considered such a notion beyond absurd, and indeed, one can only imagine the eloquent derision they'd have rained down upon it.
3) Even if "incorporation of the Bill of Rights" was constitutional, State schools are not "establishing" a, well, "blessed" thing by simply allowing the Gideons to make Bibles available to students who want them. It's a darn sight less coercive than such schools incorporating Muslim prayers and Sharia law into their official curricula, with which the FFRF does not appear to have any problem whatsoever, that I've read or heard. And it's not like they don't allow only evangelical groups to distribute materials.
And here we arrive at the God-haters' real problem and big picture objective. What they detest and are, literally, hell-bent on changing is the fact that America is - or at least, used to be, and still has a stubborn remnant of it - a Judeo-Christian culture. They're also very well aware of the Hitlerite adage....
If that youth, forcibly herded into government centers of indoctrination by the freezing out, defunding, and outright ban of any educational alternatives, and taught atheism and/or Islamic Fundamentalism, is denied even tangential exposure to the Judeo-Christian worldview - which they're sure as shinola never going to get from popular culture - then the "fundamental transformation" that two and a third centuries of cultural overhang may make problematic now will become an inevitability a generation from now.
And look, I ask you, at the damage half a century of such unholy war has already inflicted - the nation-bankrupting welfare state, the destruction of the traditional family and now marriage itself, approaching sixty million abortions, plunging birthrates throughout the West, a cultural vacuum into which Islamic Fundamentalist savagery is pouring like like a tsunami. The collective wages, in very large part, of how "free from religion" America has already malignantly become.
And students need to be "protected" from the Gideons?
"My name.....is Esusj," indeed. (Hint: think anagrammatically)
No comments:
Post a Comment