| I once saw a teacher congratulate some students for not saying the pledge. He walked into the room, looked around, asked “who stayed seated for the pledge?” Seeing the hands raised he gave a thumbs up, said, “Awesome. You people are great!” Grabbing a few papers, he left. American public schools are unwelcoming environments for religion. Public prayer in schools is typically not allowed, the issue of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is heavily debated, and student religious groups focusing only on one religion are often not allowed to hold their meetings on campus. Classrooms are used for political commentary as much as actual teaching (and not just in the humanities courses). This situation is not helped by the fact that many comprehensive liberals in the government, academy, and elsewhere assert that “children are future citizens whose educations are too important to be left entirely to parents”. This is the explicit opinion of radicals such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, authors of Democracy and Disagreement, in which the public schools are portrayed as taking on the roles of parents in a child’s education. As James Hitchcock, a professor at the University of St. Louis and senior editor of Touchstone observes, based on this concept a program “promoting sexual abstinence could be challenged as unconstitutional” since its basis is in theistic beliefs of sexual morality. At the same time, he points out, “a program encouraging sexual experimentation could be justified on the grounds that it is not religious in nature”. One may wonder—where does actual education come into all of this? When did the public schools start being thought of as parents, and not as educators? A problem lamented by William J. Bennet, former Secretary of Education and Chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities under President Reagan, was that by law, students are permitted “to get together and say, ‘We must all advance the Marxist revolution.’”, discuss preferences in types of drugs, and “talk about various methods of birth control. But they can’t get together and say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name’”. Students may talk about a wide variety of things, but they cannot discuss religion in any setting outside of personal conversation and comparative-style religious courses. Similar to the example of such hypothetical sexual programs as mentioned before, this demonstrates a clearly negative, unwelcoming environment for religion. In October, the Ann Arbor public schools in Michigan were made to pay over a hundred-thousand dollars in court fees to the Thomas More Law Center. This fine was the result of a school-sponsored ‘diversity week’, in which a panel of Catholic priests explained to students that Christian teachings were actually compatible with the homosexual agenda. When Betsy Hansen, a Roman Catholic student attending a school in the district stepped forward and requested a similar panel to present the opposing view (which would demonstrate the widespread and diverse viewpoints on the subject), the school refused to do so. As recorded by the T.M. Law Center, the school administrators asserted that Betsy Hansen’s religious convictions regarding homosexuality “was a ‘negative’ message and would ‘water-down’” their more positive theme—“that homosexuality is consistent with Christianity and that homosexual behavior is not immoral or sinful.” It is ironic that a school would support so-called ‘diversity’ by presenting a single, biased viewpoint on such a hot topic in American culture today. Problems, such as this one, are not confined to the Ann Arbor public schools however. In the spring of 2004, I was eating lunch with a friend of mine when the two of us were approached by members of the Gay/Straight Alliance—a group at Naperville North High School supporting the development homosexual rights such as same-sex marriage, health benefits, and so on—and were asked to make a donation to them. Upon refusing, we were referred to by the representative as “Nazis”. This hypocritical labeling demonstrates what may happen to students who find themselves disagreeing with modern cultural ‘advancements’. Particularly for students like me, whose objections are based almost entirely on religious beliefs. While it is believed that public religious values may be restricted without causing harm or damage to the beliefs of those religious adherents, the hurt goes much deeper; it extends into private life as well. I do not work with an organization at school to provide a converse view of homosexuality. I rarely discuss my convictions on such practices at all. My view on the subject is largely privatized. Yet the damage is still done when I am approached by a member of a school-sponsored organization and called a Nazi for my private beliefs. Though the situation was remedied with some phone calls to the dean’s office, the harm had been done. The fact remains that a school-supported and teacher-sponsored group attacked me on the basis of my simple disagreement with their beliefs. What we see here are two things: a sickness and a symptom. The public schools are becoming a forum for modern social morality and political correctness, demonstrated in their widespread restriction of prayer and general religious expression; in their emphasis on the values of organizations such as the Gay/Straight Alliance. This is the disease. The symptoms are merely the effects of this disease, demonstrated in these two examples of disagreement based on moral values. By sponsoring organizations like the GSA, and by hosting a “diversity week” in which only one view was expressed, many public schools have taken sides on such issues. This is not their responsibility. It is the responsibility of the public schools to teach students about the subjects which they are enrolled in. To equip them for their profession in the future. Not to indoctrinate them with modern social values, such as homosexuality being “consistent with Christianity”. A significant change must be made—heads of public school systems need to find a reasonable way to either remain aloof from student expression of moral beliefs, or to restrict the kind of activism I experienced with the Gay/Straight Alliance; if this restriction should occur, it should occur for any group taking sides in a controversial moral dilemma. A possible course of action would be to allow students to set up organizations which present the opposing view for subjects such as homosexuality, abortion, and so on. However, this will be an unlikely occurrence as long as teacher sponsorship is required to organize such groups. Another possibility is that the schools could simply restrict such groups—on both sides of the argument. If such divisive issues like homosexuality are publicly present in schools, fostering division and causing students to fight amongst themselves, expressions for each side of the issue could be removed. When either of these things is done, schools can, without distraction, get back to the mere task of teaching—the job they exist to do in the first place. Works Cited: Hitchcock, James. “The Enemies of Religious Liberty”. First Things Magazine, February 2004, pp. 26-30. The Thomas More Law Center. “School Censored Christian Student from Expressing Her Religious Views Against Homosexuality—Ordered to Pay $102,738” < http://www.thomasmore.org/news.html?NewsID=238 > (5 October 2004). Bennett, William J. The De-Valuing of America. New York City, New York: Summit Books, 1992. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. Democracy and Disagreement Harvard University Press: 1997. |
