Posted on 01/18/2017 7:36:28 PM PST by Coleus
The law was passed in 1919 under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan
A nun in Nebraska who teaches in a secondary school has been told that she is not allowed to wear her habit in the classroom. 37-year-old, Sister Madeleine Miller, was shocked to learn that, under a little-known law nearly a century old, habits were banned. The vaguely worded ban prohibits teachers from wearing any sort of religious clothing, from burqas to yarmulkes. “I could have been arrested, jailed, fined or had my license taken away if I had tried to teach,” Miller said on Tuesday.
Now, state lawmakers are looking to end the ban, which was passed in 1919 under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan amid a national wave of anti-Catholic sentiment.
The law is rarely enforced but came to the attention of the senator whose district includes Norfolk Public Schools, where Miller had hoped to work. Miller said a school administrator told her the district would be happy to hire her, but she couldn’t wear her habit in class. Thirty-six states had adopted similar bans on religious garb at various points, but Nebraska and Pennsylvania are the only ones that have yet to repeal them, said Speaker of the Legislature Jim Scheer, sponsor of the repeal bill.
Oregon abolished its ban in 2010.
Scheer, who spent nearly two decades serving on a local school board, said he had no idea the ban was still in place but argued that it violates teachers’ free-speech rights. Nebraska is also struggling to fill teacher shortages this year in 18 different fields, according to the state Department of Education. “This isn’t virgin turf I’m tilling here,” said Scheer, of Norfolk. “We’re just one of the last ones.”
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
Let me be diplomatic here...
There ARE hollow forms of religion, we sometimes call them Churchianity. Just because someone has a hat, doesn’t mean they have cattle. The bible says “A form of religion, but denying its power.” The power is in Jesus. Jesus isn’t always a super strict rule enforcer. He knows what to stress and when, and it’s tied to the divine plan. If He is said to have borne our sins and yet that didn’t impact the plan, then He really didn’t bear them.
I think in Catholic circles (but also in many evangelical ones) it has become particularly common to assume that because the morality talk is there, God will be there too. But even pagans have morals, though you wouldn’t want to get wrapped up in their spirituality. Let’s not be whitewashing tombs, or putting band-aids on dead bodies, is where I am coming from here.
Kilroy was here. We see the remains of Kilroy’s lunch. That doesn’t mean Kilroy is here now.
I wonder what order she is from, because I haven’t seen a nun actually wearing a habit in a long, long time, and I attended catholic school and have had children in them since 2001.
Very few orders still require a nun to wear her habit, and many don’t require any clothing at all that uniquely identifies them most of the time.
Or I might say (and I think I might be channeling C. S. Lewis, so to speak)... what purpose are the morals serving. You can grease a wheel and the wheel will work better. But unless that wheel is on the train to heaven, we’ve just enabled the wrong thing. Nazi Germany even knew some morals. As C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape said, to be greatly and effectively wicked, a man has to have some virtues.
I’m trying to make sure the discussion is clearly pulled out of this mire. I fear, I really greatly fear, that Susie’s discourse, as well intended as it is, tries to abstract morality out of the specific ministry of Jesus. That won’t work, or rather it will work as well as the folly of the Garden. We ate the fruit and knew good and evil, but we hadn’t a clue what to do with them. Oops, that’s one ego game gone to pot, and humanity is suffering under the consequences.
That’s where I am coming from, and that’s why I want to see Susie be less Savage.
The habit might be pushing things.
She might be wise, if the option is really allowed to her, not to push the habit thing, just because it is so close to the burqa thing. If she must, then maybe she would be happier in a Catholic school.
We’re even in a tricky situation with respect to constitutional values, because “gay marriage” got tacked onto them. Backing this out is something I believe all Christians of all local churches ought to pray and work for, under Jesus of course. But currently we can’t necessarily count on America’s “Caesar” to back up what is sane. Now Donald Trump does reconsider things sometimes as part of his deal art. But anyhow, we have circumstances to consider. As the bible says, walk “circumspectly.” The move that might make sense in circumstance A will lead to a spill in circumstance B.
I don’t have any issues with a habit, it does not hide her face, or her identity, but I am just saying most orders of nuns no longer require the habit, so I am just curious which order she is part of.
As I said, haven’t seen a nun in a habit since I was a child.
What we need is to have a supreme court that isn’t a liberal shill and realize, freedom of religion is not freedom FROM religion.... The first amendment forbade state sponsored religion, it did not forbid religion in the public square!
Hopefully if Trump fills as many seats as it looks like he might, we may just be able to undo most of the insanity that came out of the court in the 60s and early 70s... and get this nation back on a track that will continue its survival.
True, a habit is not as all-covering as the burqa.
It might do the public some good to see more nuns in habits. If I superintended a public school I would not be narrow minded about nuns in habits if there were some reasonable way to accommodate this under the laws that I can’t do anything about. Not all things we have stewardship of permit us all options without losing the stewardship.
America long proceeded under the tone that some variety of Christian or Jewish belief would be the norming spiritual influence. The Christian belief might be evangelical, it might be Catholic (I don’t ever know any attempt of the Orthodox to be in on this picture, but I don’t think it would reject them out of hand; it’s their choice).
George Washington was bold about it: “our blessed religion.”
This is a supra-political undertaking. We can’t expect to recreate this through any number of mere political moves.
I think it was also a risky move since faith depends on believers on the ground. America would fly as long as a sufficient influence of Christian and Jewish faith flew. But those are voluntary. They can’t be politically fiat’ed.
But God may be on the verge of rewarding this gamble twice as much as He did before.
Catholics are—or ought to be -— big on Natural Law. There are different versions of this, but from a Catholic POV it would be based on the conviction that the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature have the same Author, Who built His law right into the very structure of reality.
St. Paul discusses this some.
Acknowledging and attempting to conform your life to Natural Law doesn’t mean you are in a state of Sanctifying Grace, but it does predispose the soul to receive that grace. Thus, it is easier for a moral, noble pagan to receive the Gospel, than for a Satanist or a moral degenerate to do so.
This is because sin makes you stupid.
In contrast, Natural Law is at least congruent with Supernatural Law, and the man who loves the former, will be more open to the latter. His “soil” has been prepared to receive the seed.
It also makes you a slave.
But Jesus said: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
He also said: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"
Truth is truth, and is of God, whether it comes by Natural Law or by Divine Revelation.
If eliminate law then burkas allowed also?
I’d say the law can ban anything covering the face, whether it be a burqa, a Balaklava, a Halloween costume face or a ski mask. People out in public need to be able to communicate, and need to be able to be identified.
As for teachers, this goes double.
There is such a thing as appropriate dress. A nun in a habit, I would think, is already dressed appropriately.
Same goes for a Hasidic woman wearing a headscarf, or a Jewish man a kippah, or a Sikh a turban.
I wouldn’t necessarily concur that the moral pagan is always the first in line for the Gospel... if he’s proud of his morality.
It might be the dissolute, looking sincerely for a helping hand out of the mess into which he’s plunged. These were some of the cases that Jesus really caught heat from the Pharisees about addressing. Jesus’ own answer was that wisdom is proven right by its children (meaning the wisdom of approaching these sad cases).
Heavily institutionalized churches CAN tend to push natural law issues so far that they obscure the bigger picture. They start, in fact, to look like the world — like the way that “moral pagan” would see things. By the way, wasn’t Constantine that kind of “moral pagan”? He liked the law and order, which made his kingdom easier to look after, but wasn’t so keen on the soul salvation? Which is an issue that preceded — well preceded — the Catholic/Orthodox split.
I’ve dealt with spiritual pagans, by the way, and some are pretty easily able to accept the salvational aspect of the gospel. A Hindu who comes to understand that Jesus is an escape valve for karma, for example, will intuitively want to embrace Christ.
I think natural law is a wonderful concept to contemplate as a witness to the existence to something larger. But the witness isn’t that something larger.
And I could go further. I could aver that needing to answer the challenges of the reformation movement, which also was not perfect, also brought the Catholic church into a more generally spiritually reasonable situation.
But these are high-voltage questions. They weave a course among many hot-button church issues. Even thinking about them can sap our spirit, if we are not ready. I’d be a fool to get any deeper into it than necessary... and maybe I have. I was hoping for Susie’s sake that she might be a little less Savage about it. Susie, please bring Jesus explicitly into your picture. How does Jesus want us to address the society? Could it mean something more along the lines of giving a reason for our faith, with meekness and respect [fear], than in trying to make it Constantine’s Kingdom II?
Thank you for understanding. I believe embracing such issues will eventually be necessary if the Christian church is in fact to reunite. You don’t just roll back the reformation for this, if it were even possible. You have to roll back the rigidity (yes, Francis has some general things right) that caused the Catholic and Orthodox to walk away from one another, too.
The Natural Law can, at best, tell us there is an order of things. It can’t tell us that we should expect there to be a Savior. This is a feature of God that, in a sense, was pushed beyond man’s horizon by the fall in Eden. The hint about the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent was the first view of this.
America was built on robust salvational expectations. Trying to get it going on anything less is to openly invite it to fall into an abyss of self righteousness... which, come to think of it, seems to suggest our modern Left and the stereotypically harsher elements of our modern Right. I think this Left does know more about Natural Law than we might think. Not all of it... there are some points it wants to revise. But not all points. Notice they are big on the care of the poor, at least in abstract principle. While this piece of the Right is big on other things. But without God all are lost.
Habits = Hijabs
Ancient root is the same
I agree.
Secular Humanism is the religion of the public schools.
And the teachers are too stupid to know that they are teaching it and are part of the problem teaching this religion while demonizing Christianity.
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