The New America: NO To Voluntary Christian Prayer In Schools, YES To Mandatory Muslim Prayer

The new America: NO to voluntary Christian prayer in schools. YES to mandatory Muslim prayer

Daniel Horowitz

“Separation of church and state.” There may be no reference to, inference of, insinuation of, or display of religion anywhere in any government operation or public school, even if there is no coercion to participate in any Christian event or prayer. That is enshrined in every clause of the Constitution.

That is essentially what the Left has been telling us for years, and those principles have been enforced to varying degrees in many lower courts and, intermittently, even by the Supreme Court.

Now we know it was all a lie. It was a political war on the Judeo-Christian Founding of this country, not some scrupulous enforcement of a mythical “constitutional” provision based on novel legal grounds. How do we know? The same court system that has nixed Christian prayer that is completely voluntary now has no problem with mandatoryMuslim prayer embedded in required coursework in government-funded schools.

Caleigh Wood was a junior at a Charles County, Maryland, public school in 2014-2015 when she was forced to complete an assignment on “The Muslim World.” One worksheet contained a fill-in-the-blank statement requiring students to write, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” a portion of an Islamic declaration of faith known as the shahada. That is a direct violation to the tenets of other religions and Caleigh Wood’s Christian faith.

In comes the Fourth Circuit earlier this year in Wood v. Arnold and suddenly expresses reluctance to interfere with state practices and stated that this did not violate Wood’s First Amendment rights. “School authorities, not the courts, are charged with the responsibility of deciding what speech is appropriate in the classroom,” wrote Judge Barbara Milano Keenan for the three-judge panel in February. “Academic freedom would not long survive in an environment in which courts micromanage school curricula and parse singular statements made by teachers.”

On October 15, the Supreme Court formally denied Wood’s petition for an appeal.

Folks, I’ve never seen such hypocrisy from the courts in my life. The Fourth Circuit is the very court that ruled that a 100-year-old WWI memorial cross – an inanimate object that can’t harm a fly – somehow violates the First Amendment, yet coercing a student to participate in Muslim declarations of faith does not. This is the same court that, in 2017, barred Rowan County, North Carolina, from opening council sessions with a prayer, similar to what our federal Congress does every day.

In reality the courts have the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause exactly backward. During the House floor debate over the First Amendment on August 20, 1789, James Madison explained the purpose of the Establishment Clause as follows:

Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.

The operative word here is “compel.” Yet the very same courts that believe it’s OK to compel students to participate in Muslim religious dogma have ruled that voluntary Christian prayer or the existence of monuments and symbols that are Christian or Jewish (such as the Ten Commandments) are a violation of the First Amendment.

Somehow, if Muslims students were forced to write the Lord’s Prayer in public schools, I don’t think the courts would say, “Hey, let’s leave the curriculum to the teachers.” There are pending lawsuits in California against “Bring Your Bible to School Day,” which is purely voluntary.

One thing is clear about our legal system. It’s not about law and the Constitution; it’s about identity. And some identities are just more equal than others in the eyes of the elites.