ACLU: Saving Our Children From The Bible
Via Gary Harris isn’t seeking converts. Still, the Bible is his business as he spends his days leading classes on its history at Laney and Hoggard high schools. The more students learn, the more complete an experience the Bible becomes, Harris said.
He’s teaching, not preaching, however. The classes are academic courses open to the students who choose them, he said. His 8:30 a.m. New Testament class at Laney has barely an empty seat.
But recent inquiries from the American Civil Liberties Union have raised questions about whether the classes and others like it at Ashley and New Hanover high schools violate the constitutional separation of church and state.Is a class as secular as courts require if it says, for example, that the Bible’s fulfilled prophecies give testimony to the fact of God’s existence? What if local churches pay the teachers’ salaries? And what if only believers teach?
The civil rights group says only that it is gathering information. But its interest alone may bring significant changes as educators examine what the classes teach and, perhaps more importantly, who teaches them.
The classes will continue this semester, but beyond that will be a school board decision, said Rick Holliday, the district’s executive director of instructional services.Losing the classes would be worse than canceling calculus, said Don Vigus, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Bible, the church-supported group that hires and pays the teachers.
The book is at the roots of this country, inspiring people from the creation of the Bill of Rights to the unfolding of the civil rights movement, he said. For most kids who don’t go to church, the classes are their one chance to learn the Bible, he said.The Executive Committee has been paying for classes in New Hanover County for more than 50 years. And left to a vote, it might easily do so for 50 more. Just a whiff of the ACLU’s involvement brought out a long line of speakers to last month’s school board meeting, all opposed to removing lessons about the “anvil on which our Constitution was formed.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld the teaching of the Bible as literature, as long as it is not employed for devotional purposes or indoctrination. Even though there have been no complaints of this class, or anyone saying that it has “offended them” or attempted to indoctrinate them, the ACLU are still sticking their nose around, and you can bet they will nit-pick every detail. The class is completely voluntary as an elective course, meaning no one has to attend it that does not want to, yet this does not matter to the ACLU at all. The Bible has not only greatly influenced the founding of this Nation, but is a very significant influence in the history of the world, politics, tradition, literature, art, music, and theater and it should be taught, not suppressed. This Nation was founded on faith, and molded through the influence of a religious people.
Groups like the ACLU have used the Courts to twist the original intent of the First Amendment to their own version of “freedom from religion” instead of “freedom of” religion. They have used a letter written by Jefferson referring to a “wall of seperation” and completely turned our founding fathers’ intentions on its head. While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.
Fisher Ames, who suggested the wording for the First Amendment in the first session the Congress, complained in 1789 that “We are spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools… The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other manmade book.” Clearly, the author couldn’t imagine black-robed priest-king Judges would use his First Amendment to ban Bibles from the classroom.Source
Only since the 1960’s have activist Courts and groups like the ACLU start using the Establishment Clause for the cultural cleansing of Christianity from public life. Regardless, I fear they may follow their flawed, and misguided precedent.
Right Faith sums it up nicely.
My message to the local school board: “Go to the mattresses.” You must fight them and never give up; you must refuse to back down just because of a lawsuit. Their intimidation must not be allowed to influence school curriculum. You will gain the admiration of your community by fighting their radical, secular progressive agenda.
Schools are not political institutions; they are educational. Allowing the ACLU to determine the curriculum of the schools instead of parents and teachers undermine the democracy that our founders established.
The ACLU fight for a sex offender to live within a mile radius of our schools. The ACLU fight against filters on school library internet, giving complete access to any kind of filth. The ACLU fights for a thirteen year old child to have an abortion through their counselor without parental consent. Obviously, what most people see as a true threat to our children, the ACLU are on the opposite side of. What the ACLU finds threatening to our children at school is the Bible.
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Posted by Jay on February 27, 2006 1:36 am
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, Church And State, News
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Syndicate Me
They find the Bible threatening because of its political stance: “A wise man’s heart guides him to the right, but a foolish man’s heart guides him to the left.” Ecclesiastes 10:2
“Is a class as secular as courts require if it says, for example, that the Bible’s fulfilled prophecies give testimony to the fact of God’s existence?”
You can’t teach religious truth.
“You can’t teach religious truth.”
Then you can’t teach “law”.
“Then you can’t teach “law”.”
Sure you can. That’s not religious truth. That’s not saying that prophecies are fulfilled and thus god exists.
Here is an excerpt from Thomas Jefferson Papers located at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jeffrep3.htm. It definately contradicts the Wall hypothosis atributed to him by the ACLU.
“A remedy, however, has been suggested of promising aspect, which, while it excludes the public authorities from the domain of religious freedom, will give to the sectarian schools of divinity the full benefit the public provisions made for instruction in the other branches of science. These branches are equally necessary to the divine as to the other professional or civil characters, to enable them to fulfill the duties of their calling with understanding and usefulness. It has, therefore, been in contemplation, and suggested by some pious individuals, who perceive the advantages of associating other studies with those of religion, to establish their religious schools on the confines of the University, so as to give to their students ready and convenient access and attendance on the scientific lectures of the University; and to maintain, by that means, those destined for the religious professions on as high a standing of science, and of personal weight and respectability, as may be obtained by others from the benefits of the University.”