What's Wrong with Prayer in School?

The short answer to the question, "what's wrong with prayer in schools?", public private or otherwise, is "not a thing." To quote an overused phrase, "as long as their are tests, there will always be prayer in schools." The first ammendment to the Constitution guarrantees the free exercise of religion and there is no law that can be permitted to infringe upon that right and contrary to much of the rhetoric out there, the Supreme Court's 1962 decision on school prayer did nothing to change that law. Your children and mine are free to pray as their consciences and their religious traditions require them too.

What the decision did do, along with the accompanying decision on reading the Bible in the public schools, was to render public school SPONSORED prayer illegal as a violation of the first ammendment. Rather than eliminate your child's right to pray in school, the court protected that right by making it illegal for any public school or other government agency to dictate to your child how, when and to whom they should pray. Up until that decision became law, schools all across this nation were allowed, (and many did)require students to read the Protestant Bible and to recite Protestant Christian prayers at designated times during the school day effectively staking out the public schools of America as Protestant schools. This was a large part of the reason that Roman Catholics set up a parallel set of schools all over the country- so that their children could go to school without having to pray prayers and read bibles that were not sanctioned by their faith. If you were Catholic, or Jewish, or any other religion or no religion, the message was clear: this is a Protestant Christian nation, our institutions, our culture, they are Protestant Christian. Cultural domination is as much what this issue is about as any concerns for piety.

I think the same can be said about posting the Ten Commandments in court houses and schools. Arguments are made that the Ten Commandments are a good ethical code that is beneficial to all as well as a part of the heritage of Christians and Jews (Muslims too by the way). And yet, one wonders what the advocates for displays of the Ten Commandments would say to posting the Muslim version instead of the one used by most Protestants- or even the Roman Catholic version. In this case, as in the case of most of these issues from the War on Christmas to school-sponsored prayer the issue seems ultimately to come down to who owns the culture- about whether this nation belongs to all of us, or just some of us.

As a religious person, I appeal to other religious persons to think carefully as to whether we really want to trust the public schools for our children's prayer lives or religious educations. I know that for me, I reserve the right to teach my children about prayer, about the Ten Commandments, about the tenets of my faith at my home and in my church. I don't want a public school telling my kids who to pray to or how to pray. I don't need the Ten Commandments to stare at me or mine from the courthouse either, they are written on my heart and posted in my church, where they belong. Posting them is not the issue- living them is.

As an American, I recognize the right of every American to follow the dictates of his or her own conscience as I follow the dictates of mine. I recognize their right to to be full stakeholders in this democracy just as I am, equal before the law, whether they worship as I do or not at all. How about you? If you do, I urge you to join us at the Interfaith Alliance. Because you only have the rights you are willing to defend.

Michael Savage: Hate Speech isn't Free

There is a reason why freedom of speech is "number 1" on the Bill of Rights hit parade. The freedom to express oneself and the free exchange of ideas are vital ingredients of any democracy. But freedom depends on an embrace of the idea of trust, the same kind of trust that other liberal systems, like government by the people, require. If we cannot trust our the people to choose their own leaders, then freedom is not possible. The same is true of freedom of speech. It requires an ability to trust in the will of the people to sift through the cacaphony of voices out there and choose among them wisely. That kind of freedom isn't free, it requires vigilance because words do more than simply express ideas, they also goad people into action, they frame discourse and that discourse leads to events and consequences. In Rwanda in 1994, for example, Hutu extremists used the radio to whip crowds into a genocidal frenzy against their Tutsi neighbors resulting in a holocaust of death. On a lesser scale today, self-appointed "shock jocks" like Michael Savage spew hate speech against Muslims and the Islamic faith, advocating that we "kill 100 million" Muslims and that the US ban Muslim immigration and the building of mosques.

When he does that, Savage crosses the line. It is not simply that his bigotry is an outrage to any civilized human being, Certainly it is that. But Savage's words go beyond simply being offensive. Though he hides behind the banner of free speech, what Savage is doing isn't free, it is an assault on the liberty of everyone of us and a on the very idea of freedom. Free speech becomes hate speech when it advocates violence against another group of people simply because of their race, or gender or nationality or, in this case, their religion. Savage isn't just a citizen expressing ideas that might make the less savage among us uncomfortable, he is using the airwaves to incite his listeners to violence and the denial of the religious and civil rights of our Muslim fellow Americans.

Savage's misuse of the airwaves is not an expression of our cherished freedom, it is the kind of misuse equivalent to yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater and it is time that people of faith and good conscience exercise our own freedom of expression to pull the plug on Savage. You can help by going to http://nosavage.org. By logging on at this site you will not only get a first hand taste of Savage's hate speech, you will be raising money for the work of The Interfaith Alliance and you will find out which companies are sponsoring Savage's radio rant. Help us let them know that we have rights too- the right to support companies that don't sponsor hate. The only rights we really have, are those we are willing to stand up and protect. Our fellow Americans are being singled out by this man's misuse of the airwaves, they need us to stand with them and fight this savagery. Its the right thing to do.

January 11, 2008, marks the sixth anniversary of the first prisoners arriving at Guantanamo Bay, the infamous prison for those suspected of being "enemy combatants" in what is often called the "War on Terror." This is a date that should live in infamy for people of faith and good conscience, everywhere, but most especially here in the United States because it was the opening of "Gitmo" based on a legal fiction developed by lawyers for our government that created the first detention camps for a new class of people without either constitutional rights nor those afforded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions was created in the name of national security. The location of the camp in this base located on the tip of Cuba was chosen to reinforce that fiction and allow for the use of torture and inhumane treatment of individuals in the custody of the United States government because, in short, the current administration had created a new class of people, those without civil or even human rights.

As people of faith we cannot fail to bear witness to this outrage against the sanctity of human life and the rights of people to be treated with dignity and compassion, even those who are our enemies for indeed our treatment of them should not be dependent on who they are or what they have done, but on who we are and what we believe is right, moral and true. As Americans, we cannot but be outraged that this place of torture, and this blatant denial of the unalienable rights of human beings to be treated according to the rule of law, as well as this abrogation of the minimum standards of treatment of prisoners in what the President himself terms a war on terror, has shamed our nation and placed the US among those pariah nations outside the rules of the civilized world.

On January 11, I urge all people of conscience to join with me and the American Civil Liberties Union in wearing orange to protest the outrage of Guantanamo and demand its immediate closing. How long will we allow this outrage against human decency to continue? How long will it be before we learn that the ends do not justify the means, rather, as Martin Luther King said, "the ends are inherent in the means." Gitmo is anti-American, it is anti-human, it is immoral and America is better than this!

Go to www.aclu.org/closeguantanmo for more information about how you can get involved

Religious and Civil Liberties and the War in Iraq

As we go into the fifth year of our military intervention in Iraq, it has become increasingly impossible to ignore its implications not only in terms of our nation's relationships with other countries, but in terms of its implications for religious liberties here at home. Whether it is the virtual gutting of our constitutional rights to due process and equality before the law under the USA Patriot Act, the vilification and persecution of Muslims in America under the Special Registration provisions of the immigration codes, the stifling of dissent as "unpatriotic", the authorization of detentions without charge or trial at Guantanamo or the trumpeting of the United States as a "Christian nation," and the breakdown of the separation of church and state, it is clear that this war is a cancer that has metastasized into all aspects of our national life and body politic.

The circumstances of war, particularly a "war on terror" that has been described by the President of the United States in starkly apocalyptic and religious terms, lends itself to the kinds of abuses of civil and religious liberty that have become all too common in the past few years. It is not a surprise, then, when military commanders openly speak of the war in Iraq as a battle between "our god and their god," or that we are also seeing scandals related to the repression of minority religious faiths in our service academies as well as in our armed forces, or that Muslim American high school students are detained by the federal government for writing school essays critical of US policy in Iraq, or that efforts to undermine the separation of church and state,( a separation that has helped this country to become not only the freest, but the most vitally religious nation in the western world) are being undertaken in many cases with the sympathy, if not the full support of politicians and government officials.

That is why the Interfaith Alliance of Long Island is taking a strong stance for peace in Iraq and why we hope that you will join with us and our sisters and brothers of faith and conscience in advocating a withdrawal of US forces even as we continue to advocate for religious and civil liberties here at home. Please join us.

Abusing the Memory of the Holocaust

The recent reports of the Holocaust Denial symposium in Teheran point to a dangerous trend that is poisoning our world, a kind of disease that, once seen as on the wane, has grown like a malignant tumor in recent decades here in America and all over the world, The disease of religious and racial hatred is a epidemic that reached a zenith in the unspeakable atrocity of the Shoah and the efforts of the Nazi regime in Germany to annihilate an entire people while most of Europe looked away or even joined in the slaughter, is still alive and rearing its ugly head in the Holocaust denial movement. The world has reaped the harvest of such denial in the stubborn pervasiveness of neo-Nazi and fascist movements in former eastern bloc countries, in the rise of anti-semitism both in Europe and the Muslim world and also in genocides and ethnic cleansing from Bosnia, to parts of India to Rwanda and the Sudan.

To deny either the complicity of one's religion or culture in sowing the seeds of the Holocaust, to worse, to deny that the most despicable acts in human history happened at all is to deprive humanity of the means to fashion something redemptive from the ashes of this ultimate example of human depravity. To ignore the danger of this kind of denial is to once again turn our heads away from the suffering of our fellow human beings and to fail to learn the lessons of the Shoah that evil lives, not just "out there" in the hearts and beliefs of others, but in every human heart.

Those of us who profess the Christian faith are called especially to look fearlessly at ourselves and to recognize that the Holocaust was perpetrated in a nation whose majority professed our faith, by men and women who claimed to be Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, (as were the perpetrators of the "ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia Herzegovina and Rwanda), and to take a leadership role in naming this evil, as well as in working for justice for Jewish, Muslim and for any and all people persecuted and oppressed on the basis of their faith. None of us can allow the kind of outrageous exploitation of this unparalleled human tragedy that Teheran's recent denial conference represents to go unanswered.

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