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Sunday, September 15, 2002A Libertarian Religious Nut
After reading this article by David Limbaugh, I sent the following email to the Seminole County School Superintendent and the School Board:
I am a Seminole County resident and voter, writing to express my dismay over your refusal to allow the Gospel Choir to perform as part of the 9/11 ceremonies at the Central Baptist Church of Sanford.
The Seminole High School Gospel Choir had been invited to sing at the ceremonies, but was refused permission by the school administration.
The First Amendment to the United State Constitution begins, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' the Establishment Clause. Your action is obviously intended to comply with the first part, but I believe it clearly prohibits the free exercise of religion. I am assuming, of course, that school choruses can perform for groups like Lions Clubs, Rotarians and the American Legion. If that is true, you must allow performances at churches, too, unless you intend to use religion to deny some groups the freedoms that others enjoy. To do so is discrimination based on religion and should be considered unconstitutional.
Last March, a California appeals court required schools to allow the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to use school facilities if other groups could do so, saying they could not discriminate based on religion. Not authoritative in Florida, of course, but still a good precedent.
I understand you are also thinking of disbanding the Gospel Choir. While not as clear cut, I think this would be wrong, too, since this is as much cultural as it is religious and is the seed which became blues and rock music.The proper position of government bodies regarding religious organizations should be neutrality. If religion is a factor in the formation of any government decision, whether favorable or unfavorable to it, that is entanglement and needs to be avoided.
Religion as a factor in making a decision is the key distinction to me. Many, including some courts, have looked at a decision's result relating to religion as the determining factor. This was even central to the plaintiffs in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the Cleveland school voucher case,) and was rejected by the Supreme Court, provided other criteria were met. (Incidently, Thomas' concurrence in Zelman contains some interesting observations on whether the First Amendment can be applied to the states through the Fourteenth if the result is less individual freedom.)
If the state can make decisions (not to impose a tax, for example) based on religion, that creates the need for the state to determine whether an entity is religious, and the authority to make that distinction carries power and the potential for mischief.
Before you write me off as just another 'right wing religious nut', let me point out that while I am a Christian, my belief in government neutrality also means I oppose classroom prayer and agree with the Ninth U. S. District Court's ruling that Congress acted unconstitutionally in adding the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance.
I'm a libertarian religious nut, and judging by the blogosphere's responses to Ben Shapiro, I'm not alone. Actually, I stopped reading Benny after he called James Trafficant 'southern' (Ohio?) I can try to convert you to Christianity, you can try to convert me to Wicca, or whatever, and the state should neither help nor hinder our arguments. But too many people, like the Seminole County Schools, think the only way to avoid helping is to actively hinder.
In your future actions, I hope you will work for true neutrality, rather than knee-jerk opposition to religion that is the very entanglement you presumably wish to avoid.
but I'm not holding my breath.
UPDATE: I received a nice response from one of the board members, who points out that the Gospel Choir is a class which requires attendance at all performances or grades suffer. The result is making a student sing in a church service for a grade.
I might buy that reasoning if my two children had not spent a total of twelve years in various Seminole County school choral programs. While some concerts were prescheduled and definitely mandatory, many were for special events, like this one, and individual students were often excused from attending them with no effect on their grades.
