Replies

The Constitution and Congress mandate equality, judges merely enforce it.

Judges have come up with their own ideas of "equality" whereby if some tiny minority objects to what's being taught, they're being discriminated against. And it's only rather recently that they've come to this conclusion. It has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with agenda.

If government-funded schools didn't exist at all, people would be sending their kids to private schools that would no doubt not be entirely secularized, as is their right. So what government has done is take away the money that these families would be spending on such private education, and, acting on their behalf, set up schools for them. To mandate that the schools be completely secularized is to take away from most people what they would have of right had otherwise, thus imposing an unnatural distortion. Since someone has to lose out when government does this (either the vast majority that is religious in some way, or the small minority that is not), why does it have to be the clear majority?

Yes, it's too bad that the small minority does lose out in some way, but that's price that's paid for a government-run school system. So unless courts are prepared to declare government-run schools unconstitutional on the grounds that they necessarily interfere with somebody's religious liberty, then they have no business favoring one group's sensibilities over another's.

It's one thing if a public school is teaching entire subjects that belong in more of a church setting - there's a colorable argument to say that that's unconstitutional. But to force a school to completely ignore religious principle is to impose a highly artificial restraint on education, and is really no more constitutional than forcing it to include it.

I agree that parents should be able to choose where they want to send their kids to school and what they want them to learn (within certain limits). That's why I'm for a voucher program.

However, if the government is going to run public schools, then those schools must serve the whole public, not just a part of it. It's not acceptable for the government to tax 100% of the population and use the money to run schools that serve only 80% of the population. The compromises that the school system makes to do that are, for the most part, reasonable.

The courts aren't going to do that though. Why would they tear down the entire edifice of the public school system when they can simply throw out the part that's biased towards Christianity?

"Whether a student accepts the Board’s invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a creationist text, or follows the Board’s other suggestion and discusses “Origins of Life” with family members, that objective student can reasonably infer that the District’s favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion. Second, by directing students to their families to learn about the “Origins of Life,” the paragraph performs the exact same function as did the Freiler disclaimer: It “reminds school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by their parents on the subject of the origin of life,” thereby stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt, to protect a religious view from what the Board considers to be a threat." Judge Jones in Dover.

Essentially what Jones is saying here is that a state actor reminding students of their right to free exercise runs afoul of the constitution because free exercise may "stifle critical thinking".

I've seacrhed the United States Constitution for the words "stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt" but have come up empty.

You seen them in there anywhere?