Backing Away from the Wall

The American Thinker Blog ^ | March 14, 2010 | Ben Voth

[Scanian]

It is an article of faith on the left that a "Wall" separating church and state justifies hounding religion out of the public square. But the federal courts have been backing away from that metaphor.

March 11, 2010 may go down as another politically historic day. On that date, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted in a 2-1 decision that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional. This surprising verdict from the most overturned federal appeals courts in the nation must have come as a shock to Michael Newdow, who had previously won and then lost this argument before on the technical grounds of standing.

[TPOOH]

And where was the coverage of this in the MSM?

[arthurus]

Is this a trick by the 9th Circus to make the USSC overturn it and thus ban “In God We Trust?”

[hershey]

Teeny, tiny alligator crawl on CNN. No mention otherwise on CNN.

[daniel1212]

The first elementary schools also taught Christian morality, and even the Unitarian “Father of the Common School,” Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 — August 02, 1859), who became Massachusetts Secretary of Education in 1837, not only understood the impossibility of separating education from religious moral beliefs, but held that it was lawful to teach the truths of the general Christian faith, asserting that the “laws of Massachusetts required the teaching of the basic moral doctrines of Christianity.” Mann, who supported prohibition of alcohol and intemperance, slavery and lotteries, (http://www.famousamericans.net/horacemann) dreaded “intellectual eminence when separated from virtue”, that education, if taught without moral responsibilities, would produce more evil than it inherited. (William Jeynes, “American educational history: school, society, and the common good,” p. 149, 150)

Mann evidenced that he rightly understood that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment did not prohibit officially favoring the general, common Christian faith and its morality, but that it forbade official sanction of one particular sect by distinctively favoring its doctrinal distinctions, stating that “it may not be easy theoretically, to draw the line between those views of religious truth and of Christian faith which is common to all, and may, therefore, with propriety be inculcated in schools, and those which, being peculiar to individual sects, are therefore by law excluded; still it is believed that no practical difficulty occurs in the conduct of our schools in this regard.” (Stephen V. Monsma, J. Christopher Soper, “The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies”, The Unites States, cp. 2, p. 21)

To critics who were alarmed at the concept of secular schools, he assured that his system “inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible...,” but he did exhort that Bible reading be without comment to discourage sectarian bickering. (Mann, Twelfth Annual Report for 1848 of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts. Reprinted in Blau 183-84....

Dewey became the father of modern American education, and he and his disciples worked to change the basic moral belief system that undergirded the moral educational system, in which [when the Engel v. Vitale case was decided] an estimated 75% of the school systems in the South had religious services and Bible readings (Colliers 1961 Yearbook p. 224).... http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/CauseEffect.html