Straight away I must say in fairness that state-church separation issues are blood to me. My dad was General Counsel to the Philadelphia ACLU in the early 1960s, as I wrote here in a tribute to him when he died in August. He and others were instrumental in bringing Shempp v. Abington School Board to trial and on through to a nearly unanimous win at the Court. The Supreme Court declared that while religion has had and may have a respected place in society, the first amendment requires states to be religiously neutral.

     This means that states may not pass laws that promote a  religion in any manner, nor may state agencies, such as schools, require children to be, in effect, a passive, captive audience to the reading of any bible passages including verses from the Protestant King James Version or from the Douay Version, the Catholic Bible. (Other religions' sacred texts were, in fact, simply never used by any school district in daily religious readings, so they are not historically relevant here, and it would be a mistake to think that Jews, for example, consider the King James Bible's first five books a version of the Torah.)

   ^{Original King James Bible, 1600s}

 ^{Torah scroll}

^{Catholic (Douay) Bible} 

      Know, too, that the Court has ruled that excusing objecting children from religious readings does not answer the constitutional issue, because dismissing a student to the library, to the counseling office, to the principal's office, to the detention room, all serve socially to stigmatize a child for exercising nothing more than her fundamental right not to have to listen to Bible verses in a setting paid for by tax dollars.

      The landmark public school Bible-reading decisions are nearly fifty years gone and their merit has been reaffirmed by increasingly very conservative Courts, from those led by Chief Justices Burger, Rhenquist, and now Roberts. And yet there remains defiance of the Supreme Court in pockets of this country as spelled out yesterday in a comprehensive NYT piece by Erik Eckholm. Here are some highlights, situations that exist today.

          . A Chesterfield County, South Carolina, public Junior High invites a minister to preach at an assembly on September 1. He tells children about his saved-experience and that what every one of them need is "a relationship with Jesus more than anything else."

                   . The same school district sponsors regular, mandatory, prayer rallies. The school principal, a Mr. Stinson, says, "I want these kids to know that their eternal life is real. I don't care what happens to me, but they're going to hear it." He has, in emails, referred to those, even in his community, who oppose his practice as "the dark forces". (Perhaps he ought to have taken up another line of work, or, short of that, he might try out for a summer-stock staging of 'The Exorcist'.)

     The ACLU is working to have this ended.

          . At a Pensacola, Florida school, Pace High, teachers routinely and with administrators' knowledge "cite the Bible as fact" in class as a routine part of the teaching day.

     The ACLU is working to stop this, too.

          . In Santa Rosa, California, one teacher, with a bullhorn, preaches to students daily as they arrive to school.

     The Civil Liberties Union there has worked to end this.

          . Sumner County (Tennessee) public schools welcome the Gideons, the same folks who place Bibles in the bedside drawers at the Super-8, the Motel-6 and the EconoLodge, to distribute the books on campuses.

     Again, the ACLU is involved here as well.

          . In Baltimore County Schools, a principal and teachers have not yet been stopped from regularly leading students in prayer prior to exams.

     The ACLU has threatened suit.               

There are many more instances of school people teaching, in effect, that it is fine to break half a century of settled law as long as one sect of one religion's the beneficiary.

     Let's be clear:  these are hardly noble examples of civil disobedience. You and I know that those who are defying the law in the public schools have no idea who Henry David Thoreau was, have never read his iconic "On Civil Disobedience", nor would they, had they lived in his era, have dreamed of supporting that man's defiance of the tax laws that propped up southern slavery.

     This much is clear, too:

          . a-- Children --all children-- may, right now, pray in public schools. They have always have had that right. They have and ought to have the right to pray to any Being they like. And many do. No Court, nor has the ACLU ever argued against the right of a child to pray quietly or silently to any God for any reason anywhere. But for the lawbreakers, that's just it:  they don't want kids in public schools praying silently to any God; they want kids praying in schools to a particular version of a particular God using particular religious texts and under the direction and authority of the school itself...that is to say, under the authority of government.

         b-- What is illegal is for the state agency, the school, to set aside specific times and places during the routine school day and to oversee religious reading and/or prayer.

To those who truly cannot see the distinction, I have nothing to say other than the law is what it is; you must live with it or mount a proper legal challenge.

To those who can understand the distinction between (a) and (b), above, I'll add this: 

     America is rich in religious heritage and diversity and celebrates both and should. What the movement to undermine the law here wants is to use your money, the taxes of other Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, atheists and others, to missionize in one incredibly narrow sect of one branch of one of the world's religions. They want to do that as a step toward re-making public curricula in the image of the curricula of the private academies which are run by that one narrow sect. They are not content to try to persuade public school families to have their children attend those religious academies because,

          (1) they know that even their often relatively modest tuitions --compared to secular private schools'-- are beyond the reach of far too many and their scholarship programs are dismal,

and

          (2), they feel a mandate to turn secular, public education into a parochial religious instruction so that the nation itself might be 'saved'.

    As I end this very strange year in America with you, I wanted to highlight one of the oddest aspects of our contemporary legal, educational, and religious culture. And to say how very delighted I am to have been an ACLU member 'forever'. And, finally, again, to salute my dad and his ACLU colleagues for expanding our freedom in 1963.

     This is blood to me but it's also a robust intellectual commitment. At year's end I want to renew my commitment to his and my mother's ideals and say that I am  trying to work hard for Justice --in my support of the ACLU's efforts and in my work with so many thousands of others to broaden the rights of LBGT citizens--  to advance that here and elsewhere, to expand freedom.