Get your own Free Home Page"As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school.”
Funny how the subject of prayer in school has been reduced to platitudes and jokes. Yet after almost four decades of secularism, there is still a serious debate in the land about whether students should be allowed to pray openly in public schools.
This country was founded on religious principles. Evidence of religion is found everywhere in the United States: on the dollar bill, in the constitution and even in our judicial system.
Yet, for some reason, God in school is considered unconstitutional.
Why?
In the 1960s Madeline Murray O’Hair went to the New York state courts to say that mandatory prayer in school went against the spirit of the First Amendment, which grants all citizens the right to free speech. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor and removed organized prayer from school. O’Hair is now trying to remove “In God We Trust” from the dollar bill.
Now is it just me or is this going to an extreme?
Just because the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in school is unconstitutional, that does not mean everyone agrees with the court. Indeed, many scholars, educators, businessmen, lawyers and doctors totally disagree with the Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment when it comes to prayer in school.
My questions is: why does the Supreme Court have the right to say that prayer in school is wrong? We elect our congressman to make laws. Who suddenly made the high Court more powerful than Congress? To outlaw organized prayer in school subverts the will of the people, the majority of whom disagree with O’Hair, an avowed atheist.
Many students at Smith believe the O’Hare interpretation should be overturned. Many parents share their children’s opinion.
So why does this unjust and unpopular law still stand? That’s easy. Because many political and legal leaders are scared of offending one religious group or another. But the world’s great religions are bigger than that. Tolerance is a major ethic in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The American people are smarter than that too. This is a pluralistic society. An ecumenical prayer that would give today’s students some sense of moral purpose in their lives could not be a bad thing. Ask any parent today the main difference between the schools of the 1990s and those the 1960s and ’70s, and they will tell you that today’s students have much less sense of what is right and wrong, of what is good and bad, or what is moral and immoral.
The ironic thing is that eliminating prayer from school limits free speech. Isn’t it funny that you can say just about anything in an open class discussion, but to pray out loud would get Chillout or out-of-school suspension?
The great thing about America is freedom. Hundreds of thousands have died fighting for it. Yet school children have to hide when they say “Amen.”
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