Posted by:
anybody
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Date: March 01, 2024 05:16AM
No words on a piece of paper, bronze plaque, or marble slab are going to magically erase the last seventy five years.
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/26/opinions/ten-commandments-school-prayer-texas-hemmer/index.htmlWithin conservative lore, one of the original sins of modern liberalism can be found in Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional the promotion of prayer in public schools. In the case before the Court, the New York Board of Regents had composed a short prayer to “Almighty God” that would be recited at the state’s public schools (though students could opt out if they did not wish to participate).
The Court determined, in a 6-1 ruling, that even though the prayer was voluntary, its promotion by the school violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which barred the government from establishing a religion. When the Court ruled the following year that state-sponsored Bible readings and prayers were unconstitutional, the right declared a war on Christians.
For many conservatives, the ruling to eliminate prayer from public schools was a pivotal moment in what they see as a war on Christianity, one that set the country on the path of moral decadence and decay. Given that, they decided the ruling was illegitimate.
In wide swaths of the country, particularly in the American South, school administrators and state legislators simply ignored the decision.] “I don’t care what they say in Washington,” George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama said in 1963, “we are going to keep right on praying and reading the Bible in the public schools of Alabama.” And they did. In 1997, the New York Times reported that in parts of Alabama, “prayer has remained as common as pop quizzes in many schools.”
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