...between the years 1958 and 2008?
My fiancee and I were invited over to some friends' house for dinner the other night. As we munched on appetizers, we were absent-mindedly flipping through one of their high school yearbooks. The fellow had gone to a public high school in Chicago between 1958 and 1962. In his 1958 year book, there were pictures of the bible study club, a school-sponsored group of about 100 or so students. I don't recall if there was a bible study class that went along with it.
Why was it constitutional 182 years after the signing of the document, but not constitutional 50 years later? How did the people who lived closer to the generation that wrote the document understand it less?
If it was OK to have a bible study group in a public school in 1958, you'd have to think it was OK in 1928, 1858, 1828 and 1778. How did the constitution change to make it unacceptable in our day?
11 comments:
In 1958 Black people were arrested for trying to vote. Inter-racial marriage was illegal. The argument that folks understood the document better because they were closer in time to when it was written seems like a stretch.
Brian
And what does that have to do with bible study groups?
Addendum - that there were laws and customs that didn't make sense in any era says nothing at all about the others. In this era, we persecute the Boy Scouts at the behest of the homosexuals. How stupid is that?
A question - where was that high school? I know that our yearbook didn't have any religious clubs in it through out the second half of the 70's. that said, the Mormon students had religion classes every morning in the library before class. My wife's HS in Ohio didn't have any through out the 70's - at least since they stopping having payers in school. But I know that some schools on the Gulf coast still had religious clubs when I was there in the late 90's. So there are definite regional differences.
Ironically colleges never stopped having religious clubs on campus.
So I think the issue is something unique to high schools - where the court has decreed across the board that students, being minors and under the care of the school administration, don't have the right to freedom of speech. In general high school administrations are pretty cowardly. They avoid anything that might be controversial. They don't support teachers in conflicts with students, and they give in to parents any time a law suit is threatened. They shoot for the lowest common denominator - and please no one.
It was a Chicago high school in the Polish part of town. The names all ran towards lots and lots of consonants.
"Here in this picture, Mildred Kwzyrsgynzy is seen attending the prom with her escort, Stanislaw Grigzrbiski."
What you asked was
"How did the people who lived closer to the generation that wrote the document understand it less?"
I was just pointing out a few ways in which the people who lived closer to the generation that wrote the Constitution came to egregiously bad interpretations of it.
I believe under the equal access law schools now have to allow all clubs or none. Note that this allows the Wiccans in with the Bible study groups.
You're right about those examples. However, egregious misinterpretations exist all the time. That doesn't say anything about the rest. I was specifically discussing the Bible study groups. Given the number of times God is invoked in our founding documents, I'd suggest that the people of 1958 did indeed have a better reading of it than we do today.
Either that or we know more than the authors of the documents themselves.
God is not invoked in the Constitution, nor in the Articles of Confederation and is referenced but twice in passing in the Federalist papers. While the Declaration of Independence mentions 'divine providence', 'Nature's God' and 'Creator'; these were all terms compatible with Jefferson's Deist beliefs. Note that Jefferson thought the Bible was riddled with falsehoods.
I think the equal access law is fine, if a school allows clubs, it must allow religious clubs too. If you are looking for preferential funding, I would think that is inappropriate.
I guess that makes the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional.
:-)
I knew that if I waited long enough you'd defeat yourself.*
:-)
Addendum: First off, the fact that Jefferson felt the Bible had errors is apropos of nothing. The Catholic Church, for example, takes no position on the story of Creation and feels it is immaterial to the issue of salvation.
That Jefferson, a Deist (or whatever else he was), felt comfortable putting references to God into various documents and did not feel the need to rush about in an empty-headed panic, insisting that crosses be torn down from any and all public structures indicated that he did not fear some kind of unseen, theocratic, hypnotizing force emanating from the placement of these symbols on public land or within schools.
God appearing twice in the Federalist papers is an infinite percentage higher than what would have been allowed in them today.
We're so much more enlightened, you know.
* - Yes, I know we're arguing from the same essential point of view. I just miss hassling you.
Ha, fair enough.
'Nature's God' is unlikely to mean the God of Abraham, certainly not Christ whom Jefferson considered mortal; he describes God more as a 'divine watchmaker'. Tell me the Catholic Church has no opinion on the divinity of Christ and salvation.
But the anti-federalists complained bitterly about the Constitutions 'cold indifference' to religion. As for the Federalist papers brief passing mentions, they are argument for the constitution, not law. There are far more religious references in today's presidential campaign (from both sides) than two. I think there is less empty headed panic than you suggest.
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