-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Paul Ryan, Republican nominee for Vice President, said he believes that states should have the right to determine if prayer in public schools is allowed. In response to a question from a campaign volunteer, Ryan said that’s “a constitutional issue of the states.” Prayer in public schools is a hot-button issue for religious conservatives. Was Ryan simply pandering to the Republican base or does he truly not support the separation of church and state?
While any student can silently pray during school, that’s not the kind of prayer that the religious right is talking about. They want the kind of prayer that is foisted upon young minds by school authority figures. Those in the classroom are a captive audience, compelled by law to attend.
In the case of Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court found that a New York state law, directing a School District’s principal to cause a prayer to be said aloud by each class in the presence of a teacher, was “wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause.” The Court noted that the First Amendment was “made applicable to the State of New York by the Fourteenth Amendment of the said Constitution.”
Ryan goes on to say that the decision to say a prayer is the “moral responsibility of parents.” However, a government sponsored prayer violates the very parental responsibility he claims to support. The decision not to say a prayer is also the responsibility of parents. A child should neither be pressured to pray nor pressured not to pray. Religious parents would scream bloody murder if their child was pressured not to pray, but these same parents have no qualms when pressuring other children to pray.
Government sponsored prayer in public schools is a blatant attempt to refresh and reinforce religious beliefs of the children of religious parents and indoctrinate the children of parents who have different beliefs.
H/T: Steve M., New York Times, Americans United.
I saw a bumper sticker on a car today while I was buying gasoline. It was pasted on the rear window.
There was a picture of a large American lag, relative to the size of the bumper sticker. Printed around the flag were the words ” Help me, I am dying.”
idealist707 1, September 10, 2012 at 3:24 am
Matt,
You get hungry at night and sleep walk. Odd that your mewing does not wake you up. Are your whiskers growing long too?
========================================
Tuna can is empty again. Shaved this morning.
=^_^=
LOL
artiewhitefox,
OK, I understand you.
idealist:
You preempted my punchline. I was going to respond, simply, “Whaddya mean?”
Some other time, perhaps.
In our public 75% jewish school we had a group of kids stand in front every morning, one would do current events, one the Pledge, one read a bible verse, I wouldnt have known any better but I can almost guarantee it was new testament (cause how scary is old?)
You know I didnt like i or not like it if I recall, mostky it was just there, but I do remember eating them myself – must have liked the concentration of taste.
leejcarol,
Thanks for the viewpoint on christianity in school. Amazing. We were Christians, nominally, but we weren’t religious. Nobody wore crosses or cite bible verses at us nor die we.
Don’t remember a single religious thing being done. The morning announcments contained only secular material. We had no choir singing in front of an audience. No prayer in class, not even a pledge, bla bla.
The homecoming queen was a jewish girl, beautiful, kind and well-loved. I knew (vaguely) that she was a jew (whatever that is I said) because I had delivered the afternoone paper in my younger years to them, and collected the money for the subscription.
So different.
Thank for reminding me of how we had it.
A Christian will not war. A Christian will not sing a war song like God bless America,Yes that’s what it is a war song. A Christian will not want to jail or kill anyone . A Christian will not giving an evil eye even even if they see a nude person or a sexual activity people like to war against. A Christian will not fake their love to trap a person to harm them. A Christian will not hide in wait to catch men like people have done to Pedo’s.
A Christians will be like Jesus is who respects people. .A Christian will love doing the good works of Christ above life itself not harming anyone.. A Christian will think of others as better than themselves minding their own business. Don’t do that, and the beginnings of war will start with people rationalizing that its good to hurt in word or kill. A Christian will ignore the call to arms to war saving their soul. A list of good verses to look up, Proverbs 24 :29, Proverbs 31 :9, Proverbs 11- 9. Proverbs 4 24. ,Proverbs 12 20, Proverbs 17 :23, Proverbs 11:20 , PROVERBS 26:17, James 4;10- 12, KJV,1 Thessalonians 4:11, KJV, James 4:11
Luke 6:37, Ephesians 4:32 , Matthews 5 >7, Hebrews 12:15; Romans 14:13; Colossians 4:6;K, J, V, Philippians 2:3; ,Rom 12:17, 1 John 4 ,12, Matthew 7:12;1 John 4 ,12, Mark 12:31, Ecclesiastes 9:18,
leejcarol,
Remember the smell? Did you like it?
PS
“And be responded to with: “Whaddaya mean?””
Ot course they don’t understand, it is not their thought.
“I can’t read your mind”! And if they could, what of that thought could they grasp in one lightning flash?
Mimsy were the borogroves, and the moonraths outgraab…..
Do you know how you think? I mran really. What lies behind all those thoughts. Not just the ones yuu bother to verhalize, but the ones that spring into your conscious, spnning continents, complete into the smallest detail, perfectly lucidly clear. The ones that takes reams of paper to explain, searching for words, words, arranging them, editing them—-only to be dissatisfied in the end- And be responded to with: “Whaddaya mean?”
How deep is the process, what traumas are consulted, what happy times, who decides between conflicting feelings, where do the facts, as obssrved through our filters, come in. And sa one person wrote: after the parliament votes, when and how does the prime minister advise the queen?
One weird thing is that they can see you making a decision to move your hand several seconds before you become aware of thh decision yourself. And they can see how you will move it. So mind control is coming.
And then my dream will be realized: the tanking over of your mind to a computer, to be run for an eternity, thinking, experiencing, wandering the nets of the world, from trivia to opera, to series where you understand japanese—not only the languege in your terms but in their terms, if you choose to do so, Or bring your farong (foreign in Thai) mind to Thailand and experience it for the “first time”, over nnd over again. Just a little taste of my paradise.
Is it yours, the mind? You, the ego, the conscious mind?
Read a description of the prefrontal cortex yesterday as to the functions it is said to perform. Got D- or an F on most of them. Guess why.
Where is the remedial program for that? A good subjext for study of how we will make one which works.
(re sen-sen, my father always had a tin with him of it, ate them like candy.)
Artiewhitefox, if they hadn’t “tortur(ing) Jesus doing horrific things to him.” there would be no christianity.
“How in bloody blue blazes can church, and state be separate?” Real simple answer: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Jesus is the christian religion. This is not a christian nation no matter how many times republicans repeat that lie (or ignorance).
Mike, when I went to school we were 75% jewish but still had to dstand in line with an excuse note for our absence on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Our choir sang only christian songs. There was an established religion, christianity, and it just became somthing else you heard in school throughout the year that meant nothing.
I was surprised senior year when Cheryl, a conservative jew, complained about choir not singing jewish songs or non christian ones. It had honestly never occurred to me (She and I had been in choir since junior high) because the content was meaningless.
To me this is what religion in the school, forced prayer, forced reading of the Bible does, just makes it something else not worth thinking about.
I was just showing off.
I don’t do the S-M stuff.
Well put!
GRRR!
JeffD,
I wish I’d said that. Nothing more need ever be said.
That said,
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”
-Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Zombies rule Belgium.
“If you can’t say something nice, say something surrealistic.”
-Zippy
Artiewhitefox,
The dead fiddles. The backed male dances. An unsuccessful scanner misprints the unaffected war. Why can’t the farmer revolt? An emergency carbon drugs a lord. A projected cough bays against the abolition cook.
Bob,
A common failing most of us share with you.