Thanksgiving is the All-American holiday. Everybody has
something to be thankful for, thus everyone can celebrate.
Christians, Jews and Muslims can thank God/Yahweh/Allah. Witches
can thank Gaia, the Earth Mother, and atheists can thank the
Safeway store for providing plump turkeys. Or, better yet, the
American Civil Liberties Union for its non-stop program to
eliminate religion.
Thus far, the ACLU has been only partially successful in its
efforts. It has managed to force several towns and counties to
remove granite inscriptions of the Ten Commandments, and a
California ally, one Michael Newdow, succeeded in getting the Ninth
Federal District Court to outlaw the words “under God” from the
Pledge of Allegiance. This court’s writ, however, does not go
beyond its district boundaries and the Supreme Court refused to
take up the case.
It is only a matter of time before the ACLU goes to court to
argue that churches should not be tax exempt because allowing them
to do so amounts to a subsidy by atheist taxpayers. Alas for them,
they will have to wait at least four years, for President Bush is
unlikely to fill court slots with ACLU sympathizers. Nevertheless,
the ACLU operates in a target-rich environment, so to speak,
including “In God We Trust” on the dollar bill and chaplains in the
U.S. Senate and House of Representatives
Meanwhile, the ACLU and its friends are making headway in
intimidating school districts around the nation. Almost always
risk-averse, school administrators tend to engage in an excess of
caution, lest some Politically Correct citizen sue them.
The tables are being turned, however, in California’s Silicon
Valley, There, in Cupertino, Fifth Grade teacher Steven Williams is
suing the school district for discrimination. It seems the
principal of his school, Patricia Vidmar, is censoring his lesson
plans to prevent him from giving his students historical documents
that make references to God. He is the only teacher required to
submit his lesson plans for her approval, hence his lawsuit.
Among the documents rejected by Ms. Vidmar are excerpts from the
Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s journal, the diary
of John Adams, and Samuel Adams’s “The Rights of the Colonists.”
Plaintiff Williams claims Ms. Vidmar has violated his First
Amendment right of free speech. His lawyer points out that of the
materials Williams gives his students, “perhaps five to 10 percent
refer to God and Christianity, because that’s what the founders
wrote.” Whether Ms. Vidmar and the ACLU like it or not, all of the
founders (including Thomas Jefferson) believed in God and expressed
their belief frequently in speeches and writings.
Meanwhile, on the eve of Thanksgiving, Maryland’s Republican
governor, Robert Ehrlich denied a published report that the state
had set rules for local school district curricula, and that this
had resulted in school systems throughout the state not teaching
students that the Pilgrims had thanked God for at the celebration
which we commemorate as Thanksgiving Day. The article to which the
governor referred cited several school officials as saying they do
not “include religious matter” in their curricula. The instruction
director of the St. Mary’s County Public School system said, “We
teach about Thanksgiving from a purely historical perspective, not
a religious perspective.”
So how do they tell the story of the first Thanksgiving without
telling the children whom the Pilgrims thanked? According to the
news story, “teaching children that Pilgrims were Puritans was as
far as many school administrators will go.” What if a student asks,
“What is a Puritan?” Presumably, the answer in Maryland schools is
that a Puritan was someone who thanked the Great Pumpkin for a good
harvest.
Governor Ehrlich was upset that his state’s schools, despite no
central directive, were widely teaching revisionist history. He
said, “The objective facts, with respect to the teaching about
Thanksgiving, necessarily bring God into the history lesson…to
pretend you can take God out a history lesson concerning
Thanksgiving is an embarrassment.” No, Governor, it’s not an
embarrassment to timid school administrators or the ACLU.
Despite our many flaws and contradictions, we remain a nation
that is blessed many times over. Thanks be to G— (I better not
write it, since this website is owned by a tax-exempt foundation
and I would not want to be the cause of a lawsuit from the
ACLU).
