By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
February 1995 – In the culture war, school prayer is one more hill to be retaken – albeit a crucial piece of symbolic terrain.
Let’s be honest, in and of itself, a bland, 30-second prayer won’t have much of an impact. Young hellions will not be supernaturally transformed into cherubs who leave the classroom chanting excerpts from Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues.
Nor – despite the dire warnings of People for the American Way – will it result in the emotional scarring-for-life of millions of pint-sized atheists, agnostics and Zoroastrians.
Which is not to say that it isn’t worth the effort. The classroom is a major arena in the ongoing clash of values. Secularists have made it so.
Since 1962, when the Supreme Court declared the Supreme Being persona non grata in the school house, we’ve seen an escalating attack on all forms of religion in public life.
The court has been relentless, prohibiting prayer, Bible reading, a moment of silence and even posting the Ten Commandments on a school bulletin board.
Additionally, judicial oligarchs have pronounced unconstitutional: 1) graduation invocations by members of the clergy, 2) taxpayer support for the instruction of handicapped Hasidic students, and 3) public display of creches and menorahs unless sanitized by jingle-bell baubles.
The judiciary is ably assisted by battalions of bureaucrats, educrats and self appointed guardians of the wall of separation. In Jackson, Mississippi, a principal was fired (later reinstated) for allowing students to read a prayer over the intercom.
In Missouri, a student got detention for praying over his lunch. Assaulting a teacher is probably a lesser infraction.
A second-grader in upstate New York was told the storybook she brought to share with her class was “inappropriate” because it contained the dreaded G-word.
A cop in LaGrange, Georgia, was suspended for a day for coming to work with ashes on his forehead on Ash Wednesday.
My all-time favorite example of First Amendment fetishism: In 1991, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a death sentence because the prosecutor quoted Leviticus to the jury.
And the beat (as in bashing) goes on. When it comes to ferreting out religious expression, secularism never sleeps. This spring, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission floated a set of regulations to create a religion-free workplace. Under the rules, a picture of Jesus on a worker’s desk could have been considered religious harassment. The regs were withdrawn after a congressional outcry.
Last month, the postal service announced it would discontinue issuance of Madonna-and-child stamps. “We’re moving away from being denominational,” a postal official explained.
A federal subsidy for a photo of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine is fine, but religious figures on stamps are offensive. After patrons threatened to staple, fold and mutilate the service, USPS reversed course.
As traditional values – which once were the core of public education – have been driven from their fortified positions, secular dogmas have occupied those battlements.
If a voluntary, nondenominational prayer is coercive, what would you call the left indoctrination that has become the staple of modern pedagogy, from condom distribution to AIDS education to multiculturalism to Earth worship?
The results of decoupling learning from morality are as conspicuous as the first lady’s bouffant hairdo. In a recent survey of the nation’s top high school students, 27% of the females and 49% of the males said they’d have sex with a total stranger if the price was right.
The elite will fight school prayer like cornered bobcats for a simple reason: Religion is a direct refutation of values they are cramming into callow craniums. They don’t want competition for the hearts and minds of the future.
Republicans should offer an amendment much broader than school prayer to protect any reasonable, nondenominational government support for faith.
The amendment would say, in effect: Listen, you ACLU meat heads and black robed dweebs, the First Amendment establishment clause means exactly what it says. No national church – not no Christmas cookies in kindergarten, no menorahs on the courthouse steps or no vouchers for parochial schools.
Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council believes such an amendment would send an unmistakable signal: “The last 32 years were an odd experiment that we have now rejected as a culture.” 
