Posted on 11/18/2001 4:35:27 PM PST by victim soul
ARVEY, Ill., Nov. 17 — Jason Clark, 17, a junior at Thornton Township High School, stood at the chalkboard in Room 202, thumbing through his Bible as about 30 students stood silently, eyes closed and heads bowed.
"Father, we thank you for being the God that you are, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords," Mr. Clark said. "We ask you to forgive us for all of our sins, cleanse our minds, cleanse our hearts, cleanse our spirit. We thank you and we praise you and give you all honor and all glory."
"Amen," the students said. Mr. Clark then began his regular Tuesday after-class sermon. The theme was "Self Check," he told the group, because "basically, it's time to get real in our walk with Christ."
Mr. Clark and most of the teenagers who pray with him in this public school in a suburb south of Chicago call themselves Prayer Warriors for Christ. The metaphor is spiritual, but it fits on a political level, too, for the residents here who see the battlefield as the wall between church and state.
They include Harvey's mayor, Nickolas Graves, and City Council members who recently have called for voluntary prayer in the public schools in this city of 33,000, where community and church leaders have asked Harvey officials to petition the state for the right to pray openly in school.
Mr. Graves and Harvey's aldermen have pressed their case in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the subsequent national embrace of public prayer. The Harvey City Council, in fact, unanimously passed a resolution calling for the restoration of prayer in schools two weeks after the attacks, and Harvey political leaders held a town hall meeting two weeks ago to discuss the topic.
Mr. Clark and two of his Prayer Warrior friends, Devlin Scott, 17, and David Anderson, 16, were among scores of people who testified at that meeting, which city officials called a first step in restoring school prayer.
While school-prayer initiatives have been fiercely challenged in other suburbs, the mayor's call has been welcomed in Harvey, known to some as "Little Chicago" because of the urban-style ills that have swelled in recent years with the migration of poor city residents. Gangs, drugs and violent crime have added to the roster of suffering in a city already plagued by poverty.
While politicians here concede that constitutional hurdles and potentially years of legal battles lie ahead, they say the need for prayer has never been clearer.
"It's on everybody's mind and on their hearts," Mr. Graves said at the town meeting. "It's about our children."
Illinois is among the dozen states that allow voluntary moments of silence in schools. But Harvey officials pushing for prayer contend that the law, which permits a moment of silence in class at a teacher's discretion, does not go far enough.
"What we want is actual prayer," said Alderman Ronald J. Waters. "I happened to have been around on Sept. 11. The next day at some of those schools, there was open prayer all through the schools. Even the president is asking for prayer. But the very institutions that we need to have prayer the most, it has been outlawed. So why not where it is needed the most and where it can have a lasting effect?"
Mr. Anderson, one of the Prayer Warriors, agreed.
"We have a lot of young people in school that are troubled and hurting," he said in an interview after the meeting. "And the first thing they want to turn to is the gangs, they turn to the drugs. But they are not turning to prayer. Why can't we pray in the school and let peers know that you have somebody to turn to?"
The Harvey meeting on Oct. 30 took on the air of a church service, and it was clear that the speakers were preaching to the converted. Among those in attendance were pastors and ministers, as well as business and civic leaders and residents from across the Chicago area.
The meeting fell on the day after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear a Virginia case that challenged that state's law, which mandates a daily moment of silence in public schools.
At Thornton, prayer at least a couple of days a week has become the norm for the Prayer Warriors. There is also a teachers' prayer group that meets on Thursdays before school. The student group, which has started a step dance troupe called Everlasting Faith, meets for an hour after classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Members as well as nonmembers attend the prayer and Bible study sessions that sometimes include singing and preaching. Otherwise, the group functions the same as any other school-based group at Thornton, said William O'Neal, the school's principal.
"We follow the same guidelines as the science club, the math club and the English club," said Mr. O'Neal, who has been principal for nine years. "The only stipulation that I put there is, I don't want them coercing anybody to come."
"They take some criticism for it," he said of the Prayer Warriors. "I always let kids know that it's O.K. to be different."
Inside Room 202 this week, Mr. Clark was praying again after his sermon. He paced back and forth.
"Father God, only you know the things that they are going through," Mr. Clark prayed. "I ask Father that as they confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that Jesus Christ is Lord, I ask that you cleanse them."
The teenagers stood, some crying, calling upon God.
I said IF THE PARENTS WANT IT. And I would sure prefer reading from the Talmud over the Nilism that now reigns as the de facto state religion.
Values taught by religion are excellent, but they are meant to be instilled at home and church, not at a public school.
Meant to by who? By you? Don't you see that is precidely the issue we are debating on this thread? Why should those who have a whole-life view of religion be disenfranchised by those who want to lock God up in the church building?
The same way schools shouldnt be teaching your kids about things that are antithetical to your religion. You have a place where scripture is quoted to students, those are called parochial schools.
THey shouldn't? Says who? You? THat is exactly the point we are debating here. WHY should it not? Why, if that is what the vast majority of a community wants to do it that way? Because All-American Medic does not like it? THen are you not "imposing your values" on that community? Doing just what you condemn others for.
Every school should have two types of class rooms for parents to pick from. One where the teacher can act IN LOCO PARENTIS and one where they can't. Let the parents decide which teachers they want to trust. And if the parents want a certain teacher to quote scripture to their kids, then who is to tell them they can't? Not you, I hope.
It is. One might say He offered Himself up as an example.
I wonder what it would have been like for God to subject Himself to being beaten, spit upon, mocked, and finally tortured to death. All to save we who don't deserve it in the first place.
It is an example of sorts---He was willing to experience our travails, misery........name it.
They will call good evil, and vice versa.
Yes; and by your extrapolation, I was allowed to extrapolate further. :)
bump
This what I was responding to.
OK...I'm a little gunshy after the flame wars this weekend.
:-)
You know, Laurence Tribe attacks the Second using that very argument, he claims that the preamble to the second, is being ignored.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,"
In Tribe's argument that the Second does NOT guarantee the individual to keep arms centers around the fact that the preamble qualifies the rest, and that the "people" means the States.
"...the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
I didn't explain it as well as I should have, it is a brilliant, if misguided, argument.
I found a great explanation in the Internet, the title is "The Embarrasing Second Amendment".
Don't get me wrong, I am not a gun control fanatic, but I like to read up on the other side so that I know what they are up to.
They conveniently forgot that "well regulated" two hundred odd years ago carried a connotation of being "well trained".
Then again what else would one expect from those who love 'regulations'...........they want to regulate everybody.........
........as far as I know, however, 'infringed' hasn't changed much.........
What's in a word?..........To liberals, nothing.
........or perhaps more accurately, anything.
I'll tell you, he's a Lib, but his logic is scary once you read it.
I believe that in order to defeat them, you need to know them. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
Both Laurence Tribe (16) and the Illinois team of Nowak, Rotunda, and Young (17) at least acknowledge the existence of the Second Amendment in their respective treatises on constitutional law, perhaps because the treatise genre demands more encyclopedic coverage than does the casebook. Neither, however, pays it the compliment of extended analysis. Both marginalize the Amendment by relegating it to footnotes; it becomes what a deconstructionist might call a "supplement" to the ostensibly "real" Constitution that is privileged by discussion in the text (18) . Professor Tribe's footnote appears as part of a general discussion of congressional power. He asserts that the history of the Amendment "indicate[s] that the central concern of [its] framers was to prevent such federal interferences with the state militia as would permit the establishment of a standing national army and the consequent destruction of local autonomy."
Sounds like another liberal trying to dictate to the rest of us what the Constitution "really" means.
I say let him and his ilk come for our Constitutionally guaranteed right. He'll learn what it really means.
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