Delaware: School Board Prayer Issue Rising

The Indian River School District Board in Delaware opens meetings with prayers and a Jewish mother has asked that they stop. Instead of polite and proper agreement, she's being met with hostility, prejudice, and bigotry - just the sort of thing one would expect from Christians who have grown used to abusing the power of the government to support their religion.

The Daily Times reports:

Last week, hundreds of people showed up at the district's board meeting at Frankford Elementary School urging members to keep prayer in the school. One parent announced that a petition was being circulated and so far more than 300 people had signed it. ... The organized arrival of the hundreds of local self-proclaimed Christians occurred last week as a result of the previous announcement that a Wilmington law firm would represent the school district against a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

While the ACLU has not filed a lawsuit, it has sent a letter to the school board requesting members stop praying at board meetings. That request came after Drewery Fennell, executive director of the Delaware branch of the ACLU, had attended a school board meeting where the graduation policy was to be addressed. She was surprised to learn that the board members prayed to Jesus as part of their regular monthly meetings. "It is a different matter when we talk about government-sponsored prayers," she told the board. "When you pray in our official capacity, you are no longer acting within the confines of the Constitution."

The same paper runs this editorial:

Somehow the board needs to take charge and calm the fears of people in the community who seem to believe their right to pray to Jesus is being taken away from them by one Jewish mother and by the American Civil Liberties Union. These people are showing up at board meetings, reading from the Bible and begging the board to let Jesus continue to be their role model and savior -- in their homes, at their schools and at school board meetings.

[H]ow did we get to the point where angry people are calling into a local radio station making anti-Semitic slurs, and where a Jewish mother has felt the need to leave her home in Georgetown in order to protect the safety of her 13-year-old son? How did we get to the point in this country -- one in which we pride ourselves on religious freedom -- where The Wave received an e-mail from a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust in Germany and recalled a similar fervor that led to the election of Adolf Hitler?

State Reps. John Atkins, Joe Booth, Ben Ewing, Gerald Hocker and Biff Lee write: We wanted to express our support of the Indian River School District Board of Education for their decision to continue reading a prayer at the start of their meetings. ... As state legislators, we recognize the historic separation of "church and state," but we also believe this does not mean the separation of God from state.

Whose god would this be? As soon as they pick a particular god for the state not to be separated from, they will also have to explain what they think this god is and what sort of relationship humans have to it. That, in the end, makes up someone's religion. When Representatives like these claim that their god should be mixed with the state, they are making a mockery of their claim that they respect the separation of church and state. It's double-talk that looks for all the world like a deliberate lie.

We believe that one of the keys to our greatness as a nation has been our acknowledgment of God's grace, our faith in Him and the willing and active participation of our people to worship God as they see fit. Since our country's founding, we have been "one nation under God."

Here we go, talking about a specific god with a specific relationship with people - and that's why we are talking about mixing religion with government.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government from establishing an official religion or preferring one religion over another. However, the same First Amendment also guarantees the right of "freedom of expression." We believe the Indian River School Board is freely exercising the latter without violating the former.

When government officials prefer one sort of God and one religion over others, they are indeed violating the First Amendment. I can't quite figure why people like Atkins, Booth, and Ewing fail to understand that when a person is acting as an officer of the state, the same free speech rights no longer apply. A police officer who tries to witness to you for Christ while he gives you a speeding ticket is not exercising his freedom of expression and preventing him from doing so would not violate his First Amendment rights. That's a parallel to what we have here when a government body opens an official meeting with an official prayer to Jesus Christ.

Rusty Baker writes something that is even worse:

I'm a born-again Christian, and I will stand in defense of God and His commandments whenever it becomes necessary.

Since when does God need defense? That aside, however, since when does defending the ability of government officials to promote a particular religion mean the same as defending God? People like Baker are confusing God with Government, which is really pathetic.

I respect all faiths. I don't make a fuss about how someone prays because that's his or her right. What I do have a problem with is someone telling my children or me we can't pray or worship what we believe when we want and where we want.

Of course, no one is doing this — Barker either can’t figure that out or he knows the truth but is deliberately hiding it. No one is doing anything to prevent people from worshipping their god. People are, however, trying to stop the government from being used to promote a particular religion.

We must draw a line in the sand and say no more. We must tell those who are trying to wipe God out of everything in our society, that we're taking back this country and our communities in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When people say that they need to "take back" this country "in the name of" Jesus, they can no longer claim that the "respect all faiths." Respect means giving those faiths the same status as your own, but Barker is talking about subordinating other faiths to his. That is, after all, the natural consequence of using the government to promote your religion.

I do not, however, think that people like Barker care. They'll keep pretending that they respect other religions and they'll make noises about respect and tolerance, but in the end they only thing they are after is dominance, control, and power.

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Religion in Public Schools
• School Prayer
• Secularism 101