[Editor’s Note: Seeing the Forest and Eriposte have been following this story closely for a couple of weeks, but I thought Morbo had some valuable insight to add to the subject – CB]
Posted by Morbo
Have you heard the one about the public school teacher in California who has been told he can’t tell his students about the Declaration of Independence because it has references to the “Creator” in it?
Stories like this seem made for Sean Hannity and the Fox News Channel. And sometimes that’s exactly what they are – little more than legal forms of Kabuki theater, carefully staged media creations designed not to prevail in court but to provide red meat for the Religious Right.
Teacher Stephen Williams says that administrators in the Cupertino School District won’t let him teach about the Declaration and the role of religion in history. Backed by the far-right Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a group of lawyers funded by Religious Right groups, Williams is suing the school.
Many writers have reported Williams’ claims uncritically. It’s a shame they didn’t do what Morbo did and read the actual legal complaint. Then they’d see this case for what it is: a snow job.
Williams’ complaint includes all of the documents he wants to give to the students. Sure enough, the Declaration of Independence is among them. If that were all he wanted to hand out, there would be no problem. But he also wants to paper the children with various documents designed to “prove” that America was founded to be a “Christian nation” (read: fundamentalist Christian nation). In short, he wants to teach Religious Right propaganda, not history.
My two favorites hand-outs were a piece of paper listing what famous historical figures have said about the Bible. The figures are nine U.S. presidents and Jesus Christ. I am not making this up.
Williams also wants the kids to read a dense, multi-page essay by Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, an 18th century Swiss jurist and proponent of the idea that “natural law” is an extension of God’s rule. I’m for challenging kids as much as anyone, but is this really relevant in a fifth-grade U.S. history course?
As it turns out, Williams has had run-ins with the administration before and has been accused of using his classroom to push his religious beliefs. Many parents are furious. One woman, Armineh Noravian, whose son was in Williams’ class last year, told The New York Sun, “There are a lot of kids who would come home and tell their parents they’re sick and tired of hearing about this guy’s religion.”
Another parent, Mike Zimmers, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “My daughter came home one day and said, ‘Mr. Williams talks about Jesus 100 times a day.’ She adored every teacher she had until then.”
No wonder school officials are keeping an eye on him.
School officials (who, by the way, have been inundated with hate mail) have made it clear that the Declaration of Independence is welcome in the classroom. Even Williams, appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” Dec. 8, admitted that claims that that venerable document was kicked out of class are “a little bit of a stretch.”
In short, what we have here is a simple case of a teacher who wants to be a preacher. Educating the youngsters is not enough; he has to save their souls. The problem is, that’s not what he was hired to do. After all, this is public school, not Sunday School.
Williams will lose his case. He probably won’t mind. Winning in court is not what this is about. The goal here is to give ADF lawyers a forum on the Fox News Channel to huff and puff. Ann Coulter gets a column, and every right-winger under the sun is handed yet another platform to label our public schools as “anti-Christian.”
Have these people no shame?