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A First Amendment case in Mississippi exposes the hostility to religion in our public schools.
In the middle of the 20th century, when Nazism had only just been vanquished and Soviet Communism was still on the march, C. S. Lewis could already see the next permutation of tyranny appearing on the horizon of the 21st century:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
A better description of the pencil-pushing, bureaucratic middle-managers of the moral life who have come to dominate our administrative institutions one could never hope to read.
The totalitarianism of today is soft around the edges. It’s a gentler kind of tyranny that seeks to helicopter-parent its victims into submission. It has replaced the figure of the strongman with that of the virtuous scold, who promises to accomplish through sheer force of relentless, haranguing activism what armed revolution failed to deliver during the last century.
And so we shouldn’t be surprised to discover the vanguard of these new tyrants advancing on our elementary schools. After all, the duties of a public-school administrator are catnip for would-be revolutionaries of the new stripe. Men and women of this profession get paid to act as “omnipotent moral busybodies” who manage and prop up “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims,” which is sadly what our progressive, state-monopolized education system has become.
Take the recent case of nine-year-old Lydia Booth in Mississippi, for example. Lydia’s parents sent their daughter to school on October 13 with the requisite face mask. Lydia’s happened to bear the words “Jesus Loves Me.” The principal of the school, Antoinette Woodall, forced Lydia to remove her mask and provided her with a plain one. Woodall claimed that expressions of Christianity violated the school’s policy.
According to the lawsuit that Lydia’s parents filed against the school, they were unable to find any such school policy prohibiting religious expression. Two days after the incident, however, the school’s superintendent allegedly updated its face-mask policy to read: “Masks cannot display political, religious, sexual or any inappropriate symbols, gestures or statements that may be offensive, disruptive or deemed distractive to the school environment.”
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Booths by the Alliance Defending Freedom, alleges that the school has violated Lydia’s First Amendment rights and is seeking damages in light of the distress this incident has inflicted on her. The suit also alleges that, prior to Lydia’s being compelled to remove her mask, other children had worn masks with sports-team logos and political messages such as “Black Lives Matter” without incident.
To Christian families, this lawsuit serves as the latest exhibit in a long line of evidence that public schools are inimical to their faith.
For a century now, progressives have been using the disestablishment of religion in the United States as a pretext to drive religious Americans out of the public square. Moreover, the kind of aggressive secularism they’ve extracted from their reading of the Constitution is both ahistorical and egregiously cynical. The disestablishment clause in the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing one particular church denomination or another as the official creed of the state. It does not prohibit the presence of religious expression and speech in government institutions. Indeed, the Founders would have regarded such an idea as laughable and scandalous in equal measure.
Even before the Constitution was written, the Confederation Congress clearly didn’t intend to wall off religion from governance. The Northwest Ordinance, legislation enacted in 1787, created the Northwest Territory and served as the basis for admission into the Union of more than half of the eventual 50 states. Its article 3 lists religion first among the three main reasons for the existence of government-supported schools: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Progressive education activists are ignorant of, or more likely have willfully misread, our foundational documents, quoting selectively and in bad faith from the Founders where religious liberty is concerned. Their deliberate and deceptive attempts to read French-style laïcité into the First Amendment has allowed them to banish the traces of religious life from our public schools. The Booths have an excellent First Amendment case, but it’s not enough to litigate cases like this on the grounds of individual liberty alone. This creeping progressivism has mutilated the disestablishment clause beyond all constitutional recognition. If the steady encroachment of soft secular totalitarianism in public schools is to be halted, the conservative legal movement will have to set about dismantling the corrosive precedents of progressive jurisprudence.
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Read the Original Article Here
Our currency is printed with the words, “In God We Trust”. “God” is offensive to the government schools so quit giving it to them. We don’t want to offend them.
Not only do we need to stop giving schools the money we need to stop paying the educators as well with the same money that says ”In God We Trust”. See how long it takes for them to change their stance!!!
Sadly, we are not paying “educators”; those mental midgets who claim to be teachers, are merely “indoctrinators”. Time to change that, fundamentally.
When I attended Hamline University in search of an M.Ed., I was confronted by anti-Christian and anti-conservative sentiments from both faculty and students.
My academic advisor put all my writings into a portfolio to be presented to public schools when applying for teaching jobs. She told me to rewrite my papers, and especially my “Philosophy of Teaching,” to ditch conservative notions and embrace the “post-modern secular humanist” philosophy (a state sponsored Neo Religion). Failure to cleanse my portfolio, she said, would prevent me from being hired by any public school.
I was sent to a Minneapolis inner-city school for my practicum during the Bush-Gore election. The 3rd graders did a mock election, casting ballots cut from their school paper.
One little girl came to the teacher, sobbing that she didn’t remember who to vote for. The teacher consoled her and said, “Remember who I said is ‘good for the children?’”
The girl brightened up and said, “Oh, yeah! Gore!”
The ballots were counted: Gore got 14 votes, and Bush got 7. The teacher later leaned in to harshly whisper in my ear, saying, “I can’t believe so many of them still voted for Bush! They must be getting that at home!”
Yes, Dorothy, they are and must be getting that at home — not in an “Indoctrination Center.” Indeed, we in Hennepin County are outvoted 2 to 1 by Democrats.
boycott all public schools
without students who will they teach?
its like bad customer service… no customers, no company
They don’t teach anybody as it is.
You’d think a school superintendent would be smart enough to know the difference between OF and FROM. The Bill of Rights guarantees our right OF religion, not FROM religion.
The only thing she has is her head up her dark smelly place that her brains exit on the toilet.
” – – – offensive, disruptive or deemed distractive to the school environment” so said the principal. I’m offended by the principal of the school, Antoinette Woodall, so can she be fired because I feel she is offensive and disruptive to me? Probably not and surely not as long as she has tenure. It’s a union thing you know.
we people pay to educate our children not to take it upon themselves to dictate moral or their personal feelings upon our future society then it is time for their firing as they have over stepped the job they were hired for. Everyone should be able to live their personal desire without being subject to big brother tactics. Our constitution allows for the right to live free and to individual happiness with out liberal oversight, our monies fund these public institutions and only the people that pay the bills should make the rules, not the government or any public hired officials. We must take back the things that belong to us instead of letting hired people to shape and decide what our country should look like-when are the American people going to stop this mind shaping policies to end-this is what the hitler polices did to the young people of germany
face book will probably not let this post another strike against freedom of speech
I’m a transplant to MS from TX after 62 years of watching TX turning Blue as people moving from the Rust Belt and heavily taxed States BRINGING the very ideology that RUINED their Home States to TX. So moving to the state that spawned my Grandparents (MS) was like a re-birth or finding meaning for your life. But alas stupidity has infected academia to the point PEOPLE now believe THEY are OMNIPOTENT and no longer need the guidance that our Founders deemed ESSENTIAL for this Republic.
I was always intrigued as to where the Atheists derived their Moral Compass from? A single cell amoeba that transferred its Intelligence via osmosis? The ideology of Socialism has been PUSHED in academia for the last 100 years and the latest numbers tell us over 90% of Professors are Liberal or UBER Liberal Leftists. The result is if you send a well-grounded citizen to College you run a 50-50 chance of having a Marxist return home. I wish I had all the answers that most Ph’d’s seem to possess from reading books peer review by other Ph’d’s and the circle continues. Most of the people that TELL US whats right-wrong etc. are usually ONE DIMENSION thinking. If they are architects they MUST know everything there is to know about that field, same for Doctors, Electricians, etc. When you are born & raised in a land where Freedom is a given and education is FREE, (except for the people who pay for it) and have NEVER known REAL hardship or poverty it’s easy to see our flaws and we have had many. What is occurring in many cities with the Looting, Burning and physical harm being inflicted on citizens would last about half a day and the Government would start the Killing or DISAPPEARING of such trash and the survivors would be sent to re-education camps or the Gulag for life. What the LEFT (aka Democtatic Party) is advocating is the culmination of years of work by the Communist to bring the Great Satin to bay. Once America falls Communism will rein until the Islamist decide to bring their Billions to settle the score! See anything that resembles HISTORY here? If you don’t YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.