Ruling was start of moral decline

The Sept. 19 issue of TGI carried a front page article by Matt Smylie with the

headline, “School issues dominate public candidates forum.”

I don’t know

Mr. Sherwood Hara, who was a candidate for the State Board of Education. I

never met him. Nevertheless, Hara’s views cited in TGI have merit. The absence

of moral teaching in America’s schools is the cause of the nihilistic behavior

all too rampant with some young people.

Hara believes prayer and Bible

study have a place in the schools.

One should know that Ritalin is no

substitute for moral training. Students should not be doped into behaving.

Also, students should not go to school to learn; they should go to school to

know. There is a difference between learning and knowing. Learning is only a

process; knowing is academic achievement. For students, the ideas of love God

and love your neighbor should amount to cognitive acceptance of a better way of

being.

The decline of moral standards in education has its origins in the

U.S. Supreme Court of the 1960s. At that time the School Board of New Hyde

Park, New York recommended to its school districts the following prayer:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we beg thy

blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.” During this era,

prayer and moral teaching were norms in some U.S. public schools.

The New

York prayer was challenged, and Justice Hugo Black, writing for a Supreme Court

majority, ruled that prayer was “wholly inconsistent with the establishment

clause” of the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (Engel v. Vitale 370 U.S.

421: 1962). This meddlesome ruling banned prayer from the nation’s

schools.

But the establishment clause only prohibits Congress from

establishing a religion, and one can say the little harmless prayer, cited

above, a billion times in every school in every city and town and still no

religion or religious entity is established.

Only Justice Potter Stewart

dissented in Engel v. Vitale. Stewart cited a fact that the majority could not

deny. The phrase used to justify the ruling, “wall of separation” between

church and state is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution. Stewart must

have been heedful of the great Chief Justice John Marshall who wrote, “When the

constitution is silent on a power, it is a prohibition of that power.” The

federal government has no constitutional power to set up or discard the

religious or moral standards of local schools. (Justice Hugo Black was

responsible for the ban on public school prayer. His appointment to the Supreme

Court in 1937 was a disaster for moral standards of local schools.

Justice

Hugo Black was responsible for the ban on public school prayer. His appointment

to the Supreme Court in 1937 was a disaster for moral standards in America.

Black was a lifelong democrat and lawyer out of rural Alabama. He had been an

officer and recruiting agent of the Ku Klux Klan. His biographer, Roger K.

Newman, writes “How this former member of the Ku Klux Klan could be such an

ardent civil libertarian had already intrigued me.” My guess is that Hugo Black

simply used libertarianism as an intellectual cover and battering ram to attack

Christian people and their ability to express themselves through prayer in

public schools.

There were no limits to the hypocrisies of 20th century

liberal democrats. The very jurists and politicians who denied young people the

opportunity to pray in public schools, started their sessions each day, in

court and in Congress, with a prayer.

20th Century liberal democrats failed

to understand that judicial review of the kind found in Engel v. Vitale, is no

long term barrier to tradition and public desires. In some mainland public

schools today, Christians are beginning to pray again, and there is little

anyone can do about it.

DOUGLAS E. RAPOZO

Kapa’a