Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Page 111 [photo caption]: ―Students pray in front of a high school in Virginia. The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school.

This is patently false. There are literally thousands of Christian student groups in schools all over the country. Federal law guarantees their right to be formed and recognized by public schools. And they hold meetings every single day that include group prayers. And they do it again on the next page:

Page 112: ―Since 1947 the Court has applied the wall-of-separation theory to strike down as unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary, or limited to reading a passage of the Bible. Since 1992 it has even been unconstitutional for a public school to ask a rabbi or minister to offer a prayer--an invocation or a benediction--at the school's graduation ceremony, and since 2001 it has been unconstitutional for a student, elected by other students, to lead a voluntary prayer at the beginning of a high school football game."

Both Wilson and DiIulio have been involved in church/state matters for decades. I find it hard to believe that they don't recognize the difference between groups of students engaging in voluntary prayer (as in the example of student Bible clubs, where you simply don't join the club if you don't want to pray) and a student or a minister leading everyone at a graduation or football game in prayer (where the audience is there for a different purpose and many in the audience may be of an entirely different religion or no religion at all and not be at all interested in having to sit through someone else's religious exercises). The former is truly voluntary, the latter clearly is not. The courts have protected the former and not the latter. And it serves no purpose other than deceit to gloss over that distinction. This is misleading students, not educating them.

And then there's this one:

Page 460: ―[Court decisions] can sometimes be resisted or ignored, if the person or organization resisting is not highly visible and is willing to run the risk of being caught and charged with contempt of court. For example, long after the Supreme Court had decided that praying and Bible reading could not take place in public schools, schools all over the country were still allowing prayers and Bible reading.

First of all, the last thing a civics textbook should be doing is implying that you can get around a Supreme Court decision as long as no one finds out. More importantly, there's that dishonest statement of the court's rulings again. The Supreme Court has never "decided that prayer and Bible reading could not take place in public schools." It has decided that mandatory prayer and Bible reading imposed on students or on an audience that did not consent to sitting through religious exercises could not take place in public schools. There is an enormous difference between the two. And this is the kind of simplistic nonsense we would expect from a Jerry Falwell, not scholars with the reputation of Wilson and DiIulio.

The next section of the book criticized by CFI is a section on the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v Texas ruling, which struck down state laws against sodomy. And here again, the book repeats religious right talking points about the ruling. First, they err in saying it was 5-4 decision when it was a 6-3 decision. Then they write:

The benefit was to strike down a law that was rarely enforced and if introduced today probably could not be passed. The cost was to create the possibility that the Court, and not Congress or the state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal.

CFI rightly nails them for this highly imbalanced cost-benefit analysis, pointing out that how many people were actually arrested under such laws is hardly the only cost of having sodomy laws on the books. They point out that the court's Bowers v Hardwick ruling in 1986 was used to justify a whole range of anti-gay rulings and laws around the country:

Before the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence, the Bowers decision was cited to justify multiple forms of discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Courts cited Bowers in housing and employment discrimination cases to deny equal protection scrutiny to gays and lesbians. See, e.g., Woodward v. United States, 871 F.2d 1068, 1070 (1989); Equity Foundation of Greater Cincinnati v. Cincinnati, 54 F.3d 261, 268 (1995). In the wake of Bowers, legislatures enacted statues preventing gays and lesbians from adopting children, while courts cited anti-sodomy laws as an excuse to deny child custody to gay and lesbian parents. See, e.g., Bottoms v. Bottoms, 457 S.E. 2d. 102 (Va. 1995) (upholding a state court's removal of a two-year-old boy from his mother's custody because of the mother's then illegal sexual conduct). Bowers was cited to oppose allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the Armed Forces on the same terms as heterosexuals. See, e.g., Schowengerdt v. United States, 944 F.2d 483 (9th Cir. 1991); Richenberg v. Perry, 909 F. Supp. 1303, 1313 (D. Neb. 1995), aff'd, 97 F.3d 256 (8th Cir. 1996). Further examples of Bowers' impediment to gay and lesbian rights abound. See Richard Nunan, Legal Aspects of Gay and Lesbian Studies, American Philosophical Association Newsletters Vol. 97, No. 1 (Fall 1997).

Bottoms v Bottoms was one of many cases around the nation that used the existence of sodomy laws to justify taking children away from custodial parents. In that particular case, they took a child away from his mother and gave custody to his grandmother because the sodomy laws meant the mother was a criminal. And that repeated itself all over the country. To pretend that the only significance of such laws is measured by the number arrested under them is to profoundly misstate the reality in order to make a false "balance" between costs and benefits.

Then there's this bizarre passage, which attempts to prove that the Constitutional concept of limited government was based on the Christian notion of original sin:

To the colonists all of mankind suffered from original sin, symbolized by Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Since no one was born innocent, no one could be trusted with power. Thus the Constitution had to be designed in such a way as to curb the darker side of human nature. Otherwise everyone's rights would be in jeopardy.

This is an absolutely ridiculous statement. First of all, the Constitution was not written by the colonists, it was written by the men at the Constitutional Convention. And nowhere in their deliberations, or in the Federalist papers that explained and defended it, or in the state ratifying conventions, will you find any statements at all tying the concept of limited government to the concept of original sin.