“It’s a sad day when school hallways can flow with drug
pushing but we can’t say the word ‘God’ in a public
school.”
—Recent remarks by a school administrator
It’s graduation season again, and all across America school
auditoriums and football fields are ringing out with the sounds of
“Pomp and Circumstance.”
Yet for some high school seniors, their graduation ceremonies
have become exercises in what to expect from a society intolerant
of religion. Specifically, these Commencement ceremonies have
become studies in how to censor the speeches of bright young
minds.
Consider some recent incidents. In Wisconsin, for example,
school officials informed high school senior Rachel Honer that she
could sing a song at her graduation exercises only if she
substituted “He,” “Him” or “His” the three times the word “God” was
mentioned in the lyrics. Thankfully, after the Rutherford Institute
filed suit, school officials opted to respect Rachel’s First
Amendment right to sing an uncensored version of “He’s Always Been
Faithful” at her commencement exercise on June 8.
School officials at Truman High School in Minnesota informed
salutatorian Maria Woolle that she would not be permitted to quote
a single verse from the Bible-Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans
I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not
to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”) in her address
to her classmates. Again, after intervention by the Rutherford
Institute, school officials came around to agreeing with what the
U.S. Supreme Court has said on the matter. That is, “there is a
‘crucial difference’ between government speech endorsing religion,
which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech
endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses
protect.”
Unfortunately, these incidents are nothing new. Confused over
where to draw the line regarding the so-called “separation of
church and state,” many school officials have chosen to err on the
side of censorship rather than free speech. Often it’s the students
who have earned the right to address their classmates as
valedictorians and salutatorians who lose out in the end and have
their speeches stripped of any mention of religion or God.
Nicholas Lassonde’s case, currently on appeal to the U.S.
Supreme Court, is a perfect example of how our brightest young
minds are being forced to deny their faith publicly. A former high
school salutatorian, Lassonde was ordered by school officials to
remove from his speech ten sentences they considered “proselytizing
comments” from an otherwise remarkable speech on American political
history. Under protest, Lassonde delivered the censored speech but
also handed out copies of the full text outside the site of the
graduation ceremony.
Had these students chosen to reference another religious
source-or quote any secular poem or deliver a rendition of a hip
hop song-they might very well have been allowed to do so. Sadly,
these incidents serve as chilling but relevant lessons about what
students should expect in the so-called “real world,” where
cemetery honor guardsmen are fired for proclaiming “God bless the
United States of America” and prison employees are terminated for
talking about their faith with inmates.
Still, the blame cannot be placed completely on the ignorance of
school officials who haven’t studied our U.S. Constitution. There
are, unfortunately, a number of individuals and organizations out
there determined to terrorize schools into noncompliance with the
Constitution. Too often, they succeed.
These groups, often armed with attorneys and driven by a phobic
aversion to the “G” word, are determined to strip any reference to
religion from the public sphere. Some have even made it their
life’s work to intimidate schools into adopting policies intolerant
of religious expression in an attempt to completely eliminate any
reference to religion from public life.
Thanks to efforts such as these, there remains a great deal of
confusion in the schools and the courts over what role religion
should play in our society. This debate has raged over school
prayer, references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance, on U.S.
currency, and the like. The Supreme Court has ruled that when
school officials lead prayer at a graduation exercise, it is
unconstitutional. It remains to be seen where the justices will
stand on the issue of religious references in graduation speeches
where students, without direction from school officials, decide to
reference God.
Even Thomas Jefferson, credited with coining the “wall of
separation” between church and state term, has been largely
misunderstood through the years. In the same way, people continue
to misunderstand the role of religion and religious expression in
our society. Our Founding Fathers never intended that government
officials police the religious expression of Americans. They simply
wanted to ensure that the government did not force any particular
religion on the people.
Indeed, Jefferson once remarked, “We have solved, by fair
experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of
religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to
the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort
which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly
those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own
reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.”
For the sake of our young people, the graduation phobia and
paranoia about any reference to God need to soon end. Then maybe we
can once again enjoy the comfort and quiet of a land of liberty and
justice for all.
