I saw on Facebook recently one of those rightwing screeds that more typically is sent around by e-mail. It was about a high school principal who read a long statement about how they couldn’t say prayers at football games anymore because of a court ruling, but somehow society allowed all sorts of other allegedly terrible things.
There is so much wrong with this principal’s speech that I’ll have to take his points apart one by one.
First, the idea that public schools should be allowed to include sectarian prayers is obviously at odds with the Constitution as it has been interpreted for years. This was a public event paid for with public money. Not all of the public necessarily followed the same religion as the principal (apparently a fairly conservative brand of Christianity), but if any those who had a different religion or perhaps no religion were at the game, they would be forced to listen to the dominant religion’s doctrine. This makes those people second-class citizens and that is not what this country is about.
I always wonder why the people in so many places (not just in the United States and not just Christians) want to use the power of the government to further their religion. Isn’t their religion attractive enough that people will join it without government coercion? Do they really want the government, which so many love to bash as corrupt and inefficient, to be involved with the religion they hold so dear?
The principal, after mentioning the ban on official prayers at the game, goes on to whine about many other things that can be done in society and sometimes specifically in a school. Each of these shows a misguided moral sense and other logical problems. But the fact is that they are also irrelevant to the prayer issue. The prayer issue is a legal issue involving the First Amendment, specifically the separation of church and state aspect of it. The other items the principal mentions are not the same kind of issue.
His first complaint is that he could publically show approval of “sexual perversion” and just call it “an alternate lifestyle.” By sexual perversion he means homosexuality but shows his bigotry by lumping it with other unnamed behavior that might more accurately be called sexual perversion. He obviously does not understand nor accept that homosexuality is NOT a choice, not simply an alternate lifestyle. Some people are simply born that way. He did not choose to be heterosexual; others do not choose to be homosexual. He was taught to loathe homosexuals based on some Bible verses, and he does not have the ability to see beyond such narrow thinking.
He then complains about the dispensing of free condoms. He is under the mistaken impression that giving out condoms causes teenagers to have sex. He cannot accept the fact that teenagers will have sex whether they have condoms or not. They might have a more sex with condoms, but the end result will be fewer sexual diseases and fewer teenage pregnancies.
He then complains about the idea that the killing of an unborn baby can be presented as a “viable means of birth control.” This is a distortion. People do not look at abortion as a viable means of birth control. It is something necessary and justifiable in many cases, and it is generally looked at as the least-desired solution. And if contraception were more easily available, there would be fewer abortions.
His next claim is to whine about Earth Day as a day where students are supposedly forced to worship Mother Earth under the guise of ecology. This is nonsense. There is no pressure on any teacher to teach Earth Day as a time to worship Mother Earth. If some teacher was a religious follower of “Mother Earth” and did try to teach that, the teacher would be subject to the same legal problems that Christian proselytizers have often gotten into. He is echoing a favorite tactic of the right with environmentalism. They attempt to hurt environmentalism by labeling it a kind of religion, and thus not really based on science.
The principal says that people with strong, traditional Christian views are presented in classrooms as simple-minded and ignorant. Of course, he gives no actual examples. Some traditional Christians are in fact simple-minded and ignorant, and in fact an argument can be made that fundamentalists are likely to be more ignorant on many topics that the average person. They prefer to live in a sheltered world where they avoid such sciences as biology because it might conflict with their attempt to believe literally in the Bible. Also, most teachers (and you can bet this would include the teachers in his schools) bend over backwards to be tolerant of Christianity and usually other religions as well. But with a principal like this as your boss and living in an obviously Christian community, a teacher is not going to bad-mouth a Christian.
So, after this principal finished, supposedly all of the people in the stands and the players in the field all stood and prayed. This we are supposed to take as something inspiring. It is not. Don’t you wonder how many people in the stands would rather not have stood and prayed, but felt they had to in order to avoid conflict with their neighbors? Don’t you wonder if these people ever read Jesus’s admonition to pray in private?
The principal’s claim that they just want to pray for safety and good sportsmanship is not impressive. It would be just as good to make a statement hoping for a safe and fairly played game, and urging the players to bring that about. The idea that you need to pray for such an outcome is ludicrous. How many football games can you remember ended with no injuries? Why weren’t the prayers answered? Maybe, if there is a God, then he or she is smart enough to know that if you are going to have a football game, there will be some injuries, and God does not see the need to break the laws of physics for people determined to bang into each other.
This event apparently did occur in Tennessee in the year 2000. The text posted on Facebook has been going around for over a decade. It goes to show that the right wing has no new ideas. They just keep trying to recycle the same tired and discredited notions.
