It’s that time of year, when young people reach a milestone that signifies a turning point in life; when it is time to put toys away, and accept the responsibilities of an adult; it is time for graduation. And with this ceremony of pomp and circumstance, graduates discover they really aren’t adults, because a federal judge has deemed that an invocation would cause irreparable harm to students and families:
A federal judge has ordered a Texas school district to prohibit public prayer at a high school graduation ceremony. Chief U.S. District Judge Fred Biery’s order against the Medina Valley Independent School District also forbids students from using specific religious words including “prayer” and “amen.”
The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by Christa and Danny Schultz. Their son is among those scheduled to participate in Saturday’s graduation ceremony. The judge declared that the Schultz family and their son would “suffer irreparable harm” if anyone prayed at the ceremony.
I wonder what kind of irreparable harm these nitwits would suffer. Did the court allow a scientific inquiry into the malefic causation of prayer, and the invocation of the One who can’t be named: Jesus Christ? Forget about Harry Potter’s nemesis; whatever you do, don’t say the Lord’s name in public. It could be a lawsuit.
The agnostics and atheist, along with their power hungry judges, have completely bastardized the First Amendment. Our founding fathers believed that religion has an important role in this country; that good citizens derive moral guidance from the precepts of Christianity.
After the Revolutionary War, a great migration from the east into the newly acquired lands just past the Appalachian Mountains occurred. These citizens needed guidance and a proclamation known as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was issued. Here is what our founding fathers had to say about religion and its importance within the classroom:
Art. 3. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
A famous Frenchman noted the necessity of religion in the United States, and testified to the importance Christianity had on western expansion and our institutions:
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol.1, p. 311-12
I have known of societies formed by the Americans to send out ministers of the Gospel into the new Western States to found schools and churches there, lest religion should be suffered to die away in those remote settlements, and the rising States be less fitted to enjoy free institutions than the people from which they emanated. I met with wealthy New Englanders who abandoned the country in which they were born in order to lay the foundations of Christianity and of freedom on the banks of the Missouri, or in the prairies of Illinois. Thus religious zeal is perpetually stimulated in the United States by the duties of patriotism. These men do not act from an exclusive consideration of the promises of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause; and if you converse with these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to find how much value they set upon the goods of this world, and that you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest. They will tell you that "all the American republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of the West were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot, the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the Atlantic Ocean would be in great peril. It is, therefore, our interest that the new States should be religious, in order to maintain our liberties."
Such are the opinions of the Americans, and if any hold that the religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to assert with Cabanis the secretion of thought by the brain, I can only reply that those who hold this language have never been in America, and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation. When they return from their expedition, we shall hear what they have to say. |
This observation cuts right to the chase. What we are witnessing is not just a loss of religious freedom, but also the right to free speech; and all in the name of a myth: Separation of Church and State.