Topic: Education
_ _ _ Bless America My response to a secular-atheist's attempt to remove "God Bless America" from the list of acceptable Homecoming songs.by R.J. Moeller
(Conservative)
Monday, October 1, 2007
Thursday's headline atop Cfhicago's Daily Herald read: "Atheists daughter takes own stand at school". Dawn Sherman, daughter of local outspoken atheist and all-around public nuisance, Rob Sherman, led the charge in a Student Council meeting to have the song God Bless America removed from a list of songs to be played at this year's Homecoming at Buffalo Grove High School.
I guess my suggestion during my own senior year of high school that the Homecoming theme be inspired by Joan Osborne's 1997 Pop-hit What if God was one of us? would have probably been off the table here, huh?
Dawn, a 14 year old freshmen at BGHS, has been used here as a pawn in her father's 20-year obsession with denying 230 years of historical and cultural tradition that point to this being a God-fearing nation (with a secular government, of course). Equally frustrating, reporter Sheila Ahern of the Herald did an excellent job of failing to conceal her obvious approval of a tax-payer funded public school brazenly tossing aside a song that in 1938 was nearly declared our new National Anthem by Congress.
In the very same #214 school district, just last year, there was a highly publicized controversy over the more-than-questionable content of various books that the school board had approved for students as young as Dawn Sherman's age. Topics included: masturbation, gay sex, drug abuse, and suicide. You know, the classics, right?
More to the point, the very same Daily Herald newspaper wrote extensively about the #214 students who had come to the school board meetings to voice their own moral objections to the material they were being encouraged to read. Far from the congratulatory tone Ms. Ahern and her colleagues used in writing about an atheist's daughter objecting to a patriotic song during a time of war, the Herald lambasted the Christian students who had taken a stand for their beliefs as being the "brainwashed" children of religiously radical parents.
Denying common sense, history, and putting your atheistic dad's agenda ahead of the feelings of students' families who have military ties in their family = courageous "stand" for your convictions. Attending a school board meeting to ask that the content of books you are required to read be more closely monitored, and a focus on classic literature be revisited = radically conditioned responses from disingenuous kids who wouldn't be saying it unless their parents made them.
I smell liberal math here??
What is really taking place in high schools like Buffalo Grove is the systematic re-writing of our nation's historical narrative to satisfy people who don't like the moral and ethical implications that the word "God" itself carries with it. Why do you think we who went through the public school system (in the past twenty years) never learned about Congress' first act as a legislative body (hiring a minister to pray for wisdom and guidance before every session), but can tell you exactly how blankets of small pox Judeo-Christian imperialists from Europe gave to unsuspecting Native Americans??
Or that we don't know Thomas Jefferson (old Church-and-State himself) attended weekly church services IN THE CAPITOAL BUILDING and General Washington held official days of prayer and fasting during the Revolutionary War? Or that Lincoln used a scriptural reference in nearly every single public speech he ever gave and FDR publicly prayed to the Christian God of the Bible on national radio on D-Day in 1944?
Want me to keep going? The idea I'm getting at here is summed up in a word that the Left, and specifically the radical left in American academia, are terrified of: CONTEXT. Nothing is put into context as high school and college students today lap up the secular-progressive drivel their liberal teachers learned in high school, college, and graduate school while other Baby Boomers were busy starting businesses, raising families, and volunteering at their local church.
Sadly, all of the countless examples that I could give regarding the not-so-separate relationship Church and State have had since 1776 likely wouldn't change the hearts and minds of people who resent the fact they live in a Christian nation. And, truth be told, even the most pious of the Founding Fathers knew we must keep the two entities mutually exclusive as much as possible.
But, the anti-God crowd knowingly misapplies the "freedom of religion" clause in the Constitution and consistently fails to put it into the context anyone with a library card and even a passing interest in what the Framers actually intended America to be could easily find out.
Dawn Sherman said, "The songs should be secular," when asked about her reasoning for the part she played in removing the "offensive" song. Hers is the standard (but dead-wrong) answer most secular-atheists would give. The truth is we are entitled to freedom of, not from, religion.
The Founding Fathers knew their recent 16th and 17th century history and that King's who ran the church and state (i.e. Henry VIII) always ended up abusing their powers. This disdain for impersonal, centralized power was the same reason Luther and Calvin and the Reformers of the 16th century broke away from Rome and her Pope.
The over-centralization of power in the hands of anyone but God Himself was a terrifying thought to the men who defeated the British and constructed the greatest form of government the world has ever seen with little more than a rag-tag army, a commitment to democracy, and a collective firm belief in the Almighty and His providence.
I have but one question to ask the Sherman family, popular atheists like Christopher Hitchens, and any of you reading this that have been liberally indoctrinated with political correctness (and the antipathy toward any claim of objective truth that comes along with the "tolerance" championed by the Left in American schools and journalism): When Thomas Jefferson used the term "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, what did he mean?
The foundational sentence in the foundational document of the freest, most prosperous nation reads, "With certain inalienable rights, endowed by our Creator: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Who or what is the "Creator" he references?
According to those who signed their names to the precious document, it is God, not Man, who grants freedom to the men, women, and children of the United States (and truthfully, the world).
What are we to do with this word, "Creator"? Those intent on seeing God removed from the American public square are not only knowingly attempting to re-write history, but worse still, they are removing the very core of our forefather's argument to the world as to why they deserved to be free. Their God-centric conviction has anchored the freedoms and way of life we've enjoyed for more than two centuries.
And now we're going to throw that all away because a 14 year-old girl's dad shamelessly fed her (and the other 40 students in that Student Council meeting who voted along with Dawn) a lie that God Bless America would be antithetical to the spirit of tolerance that millions have flocked to the United States to enjoy?
Either we are a nation that believes in the "first principles" espoused by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington, or we are something far, far worse, Europe. There they have adopted the "anything goes, as long as God isn't brought up to ruin our fun" lifestyle and now boast: the lowest birth rate of any continent (save Antarctica, but it's a close one); economic instability to the point where they had to gang up in a Union to compete with Uncle Sam's free market; and perpetual threats from radical Islamic terrorism which come from within their own European population (see: citizenship of 7/7 and Madrid bombers, and Vincent Van Gogh's grandson's murderers).
America could have been founded by Bedouin sheiks from the Middle East who prayed to Allah five times a day, but it wasn't. It could have been Torah-believing Jews from the Holy Land who settled Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, but it wasn't. It could have been Buddhist monks from China, but it wasn't.
The story of America, of the Western Civilized World itself, is (for better or worse) inseparable from the Judeo-Christian heritage that spawned it. This is the simple, uncomfortable, unadulterated truth. It's not a perfect history, but it's our history.
So let the band play and kids sing God Bless America at every Homecoming around the country this year, and we should all thank our lucky stars (unless you prefer to thank the Person who created those stars) that our national ancestors were who they were, and believed what they believed. The State has no business in the Church, but every member of the Church must remain vigilantly involved in the State.
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2007 R.J. Moeller, all rights reserved.
Published: Monday, October 1, 2007
Last modified: Monday, October 1, 2007
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Posted By: A Thinking BUM
Date: 2007-10-01 11:12:33
The question a person should answer is, "Should the government (and/or public schools) be neutral w/ regard to religion?"
If you answer "yes", then having the gov't or school proclaim things about "God" is inappropriate. Just as inappropriate as having all school children proclaim that "God is just pretend" before school starts every day.
If you answer "no", then you have no a priori objection to government being hostile to religion. In which case, a school that has all their children proclaim "God is imaginary" before school each day is just fine (the children have the option of remaining silent during this time, of course).
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2007-10-01 12:10:52
Let's also take notice that the people who colonized and founded this country were themselves outcasts for having objected to certain religious requirements in their homelands. They had every reason to fear state-imposed religious values. One man's religion is another man's apostasy.
The main reason there's a dispute here is because we're talking about government-funded schools. Because they are funded by the money of all taxpayers, it is inappropriate to favor one particular religious theme over another, even with reference to God himself. For instance, should atheists have to put up with religious themes in public schools simply because they're in the minority? Of course not. I imagine they would be offended at the notion.
That's why Thomas Jefferson fought (with James Madison's help) so hard to have the new State of Virginia pass a bill that recognized the inherent and necessary separation of church and state. It was a hard-fought battle because the most populace church in the country was the Anglican church, and they had during colonial times successfully passed a number of laws that were alien to minority religions like Quakers.
Historian Fawn M. Brodie wrote, "Jefferson never spoke specifically of the bigotry of the clergymen of his adolescence; his hatred of the Anglican church was generalized rather than specific, but no less deadly. As a lawyer, and new critic of the whole Virginia legal code, he had learned if he did not know it as a child that heresy to the Church of England could be punished by death, that denial of the Trinity was punishable on the third offense by three years in prison, that freethinkers and Unitarians could be declared unfit parents and deprived of their children." (from Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Fawn M. Brody, WW Norton & Co., New York, 1974)
Jefferson's bill was mirrored in other states around the newly formed country, and we still honor that concept today for good reason. As the above quote shows, America's founders also had much to rue about the dominant founding religion at that time. This is why separation of church and state has been so vigorously defended by so many right up to this day.
The best solution here isn't to dictate which religious themes are acceptable and which aren't. The best solution would be to stop forcing people to fund public schools where they don't have children attending. This takes away the need for the state to be the main funder, since funding would come from the parents themselves and would eliminate any need for issues of the kind that you have raised here.
Posted By: Robert Herrick
Date: 2007-10-01 13:44:04
You don't buy tickets to a rock concert to hear preaching. You don't go to a ball game to get a sermon. You don't schedule a homecoming dance to hear songs about god. I think it's as simple as that. The context is what matters. She should have objected that patriotic songs should be closer to July 4 and not this particular event.
Question - If this country had been founded by Bedouin sheiks from the Middle East who prayed to Allah five times a day, would you want songs of Allah played at your homecoming dance?
And Walt Thiessen's post about eliminating public funding for public schools, that would result in too many problems. Either you end up with large religious families that cannot afford to educate their children or you have the churches pay for the religious education of their members and the minority believers/unbelievers can't afford to educate their children. Publicly funded education works best for all.
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2007-10-01 14:36:58
"And Walt Thiessen's post about eliminating public funding for public schools, that would result in too many problems."
And what's your evidence for this? This is one of those knee-jerk reactions that don't play out well when compared to reality.
There are plenty of small, no-endowment private schools that have been created over the years to prove you wrong. I helped found one of them, the Mountain Laurel Sudbury School in New Britain, CT, which opened one year to the day after 9/11. The school manages to have low tuition and a tuition assistance program for kids from poor families, all without a single taxpayer dollar contributed. They don't even have an endowment! If the school had the population of a public school, there'd be more money available (even in a poor neighborhood) than you can shake a stick at. As it is, they only have a handful of students, yet they manage to struggle on. How do they do it? The don't pay their staff ridiculously high salaries.
The problem with public schools being funded by parents isn't that people can't afford to educate their kids out of their own pockets. The problem is that the way public schools are currently financed, teachers (and administrators) are being paid way more than the school districts could reasonably afford. They get away with it because they know that funds will come from all taxpayers, not just from parents. In fact, they count on that fact to keep pay levels high. Teacher tenure helps insure that this system will remain resistant to change.
If you insist on paying large salaries to teachers and even larger salaries to administrators, then sure, public schools aren't affordable to the poor. But heck, under those circumstances, they aren't affordable for anyone out-of-pocket except the very rich.
Posted By: Gary Lee Whitaker
Date: 2007-10-01 21:13:14
I know that Walt is 98% right and that he will have a come back. Remember that I agree with you about everything except; the separation of church and state does not exist in the Constitution, the founders did not want a national church like they had in England. They wanted religious freedom without the Feds making people contribute to a particular faction.
Connecticut had a State Church until 1830, well after the Constitution. I would think most rational people including myself would oppose this today. But who in the world is familiar with State rights anymore?
Posted By: Bruce in Orlando
Date: 2007-10-02 07:10:08
That evil Dawn and her evil daddy! They took my god away. Now my kids can't be pious Christians. Cause we know that the "God" referred to is the Christian god. And we know that churches are soooo hard to find. I have 10% of my salary to give away but I can't find a clergyman to take it from me.
Please don't blame the rules that were invoked by the Sherman's that the school district realized they had to follow. Those rules are wrong and our schools should include neutral, monotheist, protestant-acceptable prayer. We are a Christian nation and all children taught in public schools should have to stand by while their administrators invoke a non-sectarian god that starts with a 'G' not an 'A' and is not polythiestic and is not too Jewy and has no connection to pagan worship (the first Americans).
Whew! Did I cover it all?
Praise!
"Connecticut had a State Church until 1830, well after the Constitution."
Great, you're a history buff! So surely you are familiar with the 14th amendment to the U.S. constitution, which extended limitations on government interference with constitutional rights from the federal government to all local and state governments.
I notice that no one has tackled the core question of my argument: What does the word "Creator" mean? If we can't talk about God in secular schools, how do we explain to our kids what the Declaration of Independence means to our freedoms and existence as a nation? The fundamental concept of our entire democracy is that God, not Man, grants us the freedom that we can then collectively agree to share to better foster our established society. It's right there, in plain English, with more than 50 signatures, on the most important document in our nation's history. What do we say about it? How do you suggest that be taught in public schools?
Bruce in Orlando's sarcasim is duely noted, and I understand the frustrations that many non-religious people have with fanatics. I am a Christian, and am proud of my beliefs. I am also proud of my country, and its long-standing tradition of being a secular government, and a religious society. People have gone too far on either side, and all I am asking for is a reasoned debate about the undeniable influence Christianity (or at least, Judeo-Christian faith) has had, and should continue to have, in America. Christopher Hitchens is a putz, but so are people who say that prayer in school is necessary.
No one is saying Dawn and her "evil daddy" are taking "my god away" (I noticed it was in lower-case), but they are attempting to re-write history. I want my kids to learn about the sickening way preachers in the South rationalized away slavery, but I also want them to learn that men like John Adams and Samuel Adams and George Washington believed in God, prayed daily, and fervently desired a moral, religious nation for their new republic. Family matters. This country and its continued success matters. God matters (to more than 90% of Americans).
"But who in the world is familiar with State rights anymore?"
It takes some nerve for people who are imposing their will on the world with every nuclear weapon man can conceive, sixty-one military bases in nineteen countries, sponsored tyrants, torturers, killers, and sundry dictators and corrupt puppet-presidents in 31 countries (list provided if requested) to complain about their rights. But it is so human, so American, to whine about rights when 160,000 troops and the likes of Blackwater are murdering the people of Iraq as they please. Saddam was our puppet that Reagan and Bush wined and dined, as they did Noriega. And when our buddy Batista bit the hand that was feeding him, we recruited Mr. Castro. Now there's a case of helping some people establish some State rights. But that didn't go as planned either, so between October 1960 and April 1961, the CIA introduced 75 tons of explosives in 30 secret aerial missions, and 45 tons of weapons and explosives in 31 Marine infiltrations. These materials were used to perpetrate 310 attacks with bombs, derail 6 trains, and set fire to 150 factories and 800 plantations (Official documents from the U.S. government, formerly classified as Top Secret and Eyes Only for the President, were recently declassified, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act). Oh, and did I mention that during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, the dengue hemorrhagic fever was introduced in Cuba affecting about 344,203 persons, with the record case of 11,400 who fell ill in a single day--July 6, 1981?
No one said Jesus. He did, however, say God. The same God in God Bless America, which is a patriotic song as well...something Jefferson would have greatly approved of. A Thinking Bum, you're exposing either your own bias or misunderstanding of history. Again, I'm not suggesting kids be taught that Jesus is the Messiah that the OT foretold of; I just want professors and teachers and journalists and Christopher Hitchens to acknowledge and allow the facts that we are who we are as a nation, and its a Christian one. If it really didn't matter who founded America, and there is nothing unique about the Pilgrim-Puritan heritage (that even Tocqueville pointed to as the real genesis of America's free and prosperous society), then why is it no Islamic regime has the freedom and prosperity that we do? Why did the Native Americans never live together in harmony with each other and establish a Bill of Rights (more Native Americans were killed by each other than Americans, btw). Why were Buddhists in China or Polythesits on Malaysian islands not the ones to create representative democracy or conceieve of a free market economy?
I'm not saying we are inherently "better" people individually because of who we are as a nation. But, this insistence among academics especially to belittle and ignore our true historical narrative as a country (including the overwhelming amount of evidence that shows God, yes, the Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testament, has been front and center in our society for 230 years) is pathetic and unfounded. And the only response to hard evidence and thoughtful discourse as the kinds I've produced is disingenuous and sophmoric posts such as the one you put up just now, Thinking Bum. I'm sure you're a nice guy, and you honestly want to make sure the Church and State wall is kept in place, but we're talking about the literal and actual history of our nation here. We cannot deny it exists simply because God isn't as popular or prevelant in this era as He has been for two centuries prior.
“God who gave us life, gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” –Thomas Jefferson (1785)
Read the Declaration of Independence. He said "Nature" first and then "Nature's God." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Christian god. Oh yah, and Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus either, so I guess we are not the sort of country that believes in the Trinity, eh?
Other's have made good comments, so I'll just say this. If you're so certain the framers intended "creator" to mean "God," why didn't they just say "God."? These authors of our foundational docuements used words very precisely. So, RL, maybe the question you should be answering is, if they meant "God," why did they choose the word "creator" instead?
Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is not a relevant document when it comes to legal arguments. It's a great document, no doubt. It's inspirational and makes an original case of self-governance and unalienable rights. But it is written in the context of telling Great Britian why it should piss off. It is not a governing document. That's what we have the constitution for, which makes two references to keeping the church and state separate -- in Article 1 Section 6, prohibiting a religious oath to hold office and in the First Amendment.
As a passionate atheist myself, I find it very disheartening to hear of events like this. The individual has freedom from religion just as much as the individual has freedom of religion. The important thing is to be able to coexist socially, which is something we all need to work on, regardless of our faith or lack of it. That a song played at a Homecoming dance in a high school could destroy anyone's abilitiy to coexist socially is ridiculous.
Please understand that most atheists really are not like this. Just as you have intolerant Christians and intolerant Muslims, etc. etc., you will have intolerant atheists.
Dawn and her father were only trying to act accordingly (albeit radically) to their convictions, and what their values were, just as theists so often do. So I guess I'm just asking you to put yourself in their shoes - when you believe your beliefs are threatened.
I think we all just take ourselves far too seriously sometimes, and as a result we become burried in all of this politically correct bullshit.
Thomas Jefferson, and most of the founding fathers, in fact, were Deists. The "creator" Jefferson referred to was the Deist idea that some force created the world, and has now abandoned it, and we are all on our own. There's nothing Judeo-Christian about it.
And as for the controversy over the books, those topics actually often ARE in the classics. Romeo & Juliet was essentially about two teens who have premarital sex and later commit suicide. Some of the greatest books in our history have been written about drugs and under the influence of drugs - drugs, in fact, are as much a part of our nation's history as Judeo-Christian theology is. The Picture of Dorian Gray contains looooads of homoeroticism, and it remains one of the best books to come out of the Victorian era. And masturbation should be advocated because it's a deterrent from seeking sexual stimulation elsewise.
You might have the right to decide what you and your children read, but you do not have the right to decide what everyone else can and cannot read.
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2007 R.J. Moeller, all rights reserved.