Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 22, 1998
U.S. judge compels teacher training on prayer
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Cary Carlyle, principal of the 900-student Sylvania School in northeastern Alabama's DeKalb County, is conversant on Plato, states' rights and religion in public schools.
He also resents a federal judge's order sending him and some 500 other teachers and staff from the county's eight schools to a presentation tomorrow on the role of religion in the public schools.
"I'm just not used to the federal courts telling us what to teach," he says. "It's unconstitutional; there's no way around it. Every teacher here is state-certified, but we're not trained enough for Judge DeMent's liking, so we're being sent back to school to learn some more."
This week, the mountainous county, which even boasts a ski resort, is ground zero in the nation's culture wars over that most nettlesome of topics: school prayer. Infuriated students by the hundreds walked out of classes in this rural part of the state after U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent handed down a 20-page injunction last fall -- supported by 62 pages of findings --forbidding certain religious practices.
Those practices include prayer before or during school football games, graduation ceremonies or assemblies; allowing Gideons International to pass out free Bibles to students on school grounds and allowing teachers to lead prayers --all with the backing of the Alabama state legislature.
Such overt expressions of religion in public schools have not sat well with the American Civil Liberties Union, which in 1996 filed suit against the county school system with the help of Michael Chandler, an assistant principal at Valley Head School in the central part of the county. Last March, Judge DeMent struck down Alabama's prayer law, which specified that schools "shall not prevent student-initiated voluntary school prayer at school or school-related events which are nonsectarian and non-proselytizing in nature."
Last October, the judge issued the injunction, appointing a local Southern Baptist minister to monitor any suspicious religious activity in the schools. It also stipulated that DeKalb educators must attend tomorrow's three-hour session on "Finding Common Ground" at a local community college. Leading it will be three representatives from the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.
Charles Haynes, the senior scholar leading the workshop, is none too happy with the local unhappiness about the meeting.
"A court-ordered religious training session is the worst way to enter a community," he says, adding that he, lawyer Oliver Thomas and project coordinator Marcia Beauchamp are paying their own way to come for what's essentially a lecture on case law on school prayer over the past 30 years.
"It'll be bumpy," he predicts. "The governor's position is the federal Bill of Rights does not bind the states; that states have the right to handle prayer in schools the way they want to. That is a very quixotic view, I must say.
"I am from the South, and I do understand in my heart why people are so upset. People can see their religious faith can be honored, so long as the government does not tell them how to practice it."
What really riled teachers and parents both was a veiled threat from the school board's attorney, Bob French.
"A person who chooses not to abide by the court's orders could soon hear the knock of federal marshals on his or her front door with a free ride to a very unpleasant place," said an open letter from Mr. French that was distributed at several schools. This made Brenda Douglas, a Spanish teacher at Fyffe School, a few miles southwest of Valley Head, see red.
"When I read that letter, I was completely disgusted," she says. "The tone was very 'you do this or this happens to you.' One teacher told me he felt like being sick that day."
Maybe Alabama is a state that simply needs to catch up with the rest of the country, suggests Pamela Sumner, a Birmingham lawyer who is volunteering her services to the ACLU.
"We are a civically illiterate people, and we refuse to believe in the judicial branch of the government," she says. "We have a history of governors saying, 'Get your federal judiciary out of here.' We believe in states' rights, and we believe in minority will. Just as you had Gov. George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door on racism, you have Fob James in the schoolhouse door on school prayer."
In reaction to Judge Dement's ruling, the state legislature has sent the governor a bill that calls for a mandatory period of "quiet reflection" in schools.
The legislation, which has the governor's support, would require teachers to "conduct a brief period of quiet reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation of every pupil in the classroom."
Gov. Forrest Hood "Fob" James, named after two Confederate generals, is a popular villain at the ACLU. Mr. James, for whom school prayer is as native to the state as sweet iced tea, threatened last fall to defy Judge DeMent's order by leading prayers at any public school that would invite him. He later backed down, saying he wouldn't use prayer as a form of protest.
He did, however, protest an ACLU lawsuit last year involving Etowah County Circuit Judge Roy S. Moore. Judge Moore made national news in 1997 for refusing to remove a redwood plaque of the Ten Commandments posted behind his bench and insisting on opening jury sessions with a prayer by a Christian minister.
When Mr. James promised he would send in the National Guard, state troopers and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Judge Moore's Ten Commandments on the walls, Judge Moore was soon making space in his appointment book for national media.
Although the lawsuit was dismissed Jan. 23 by the Alabama Supreme Court, the ACLU has now filed suit on behalf of a Jewish family in Troy, a city of 13,700 in the southeastern corner of the state. The suit charges schools in rural Pike County for persecuting the four Herring children over their refusal to pray in school and write religious essays.
"For quite a few years, we've had a governor who's been a blatant supporter of prayer in public school and who's used his office to promote prayer," says ACLU state Executive Director Olivia Turner.
"This includes teachers reading Scripture, various kinds of devotional exercises at compulsory school events and many compulsory rallies where there was preaching and praying.
"In the deep South, these unconstitutional practices have gone unabated -- in the rural South in particular -- for decades," Miss Turner says.
"We get many, many complaints year in and year out from Christians and non-Christians who are offended by these practices because they want religious belief and practice to be a matter for the home and the church," she says. "But very few of these folks are willing to stand up and challenge them. We're told the retaliation by teachers and principals if you challenge these practices is quite forbidding."
That's nonsense, says Dean Young, director of the Christian Family Association in Gadsden, a town 20 miles south of the DeKalb County line. The CFA is sponsoring a rally tomorrow in support of the teachers.
"Alabamans would never force someone to have prayer," he says, "but voluntary prayer is ingrained in our society.
"The vast majority of Alabamans stand behind conservative, pro-family values, which means people being able to acknowledge God. The ACLU is a small minority here. Evidently they have nothing else to do but file lawsuits and harass people."Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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