Time to drag southern Delaware town kicking and screaming into the 21st Century

August 5, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

I normally favor trying to work out disputes through dialogue and compromise rather than lawsuits. But sometimes people act so darn stubborn and backward that they deserve to be sued into the Stone Age.

Case in point: the rubes in the Indian River School District in Georgetown, Del.

As detailed in The New York Times recently, many of the people in this school seem to believe their job is evangelizing about Jesus instead of teaching. When a Jewish family grew weary of the proselytizing, the community’s reaction was to tell them to get out of town.

“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,” resident Kenneth R. Stevens told The Times. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”

Ken, I have a news flash for you: Change is coming. Your way of life is ignorant, rude and wrong. And if necessary, it will be altered via court order.

The woman who raised the issue, Mona Dobrich, a 30-year resident of the community, put up with school-sponsored religion for many years. She said the final straw occurred in June of 2004 after listening to a guest minister pontificate during her daughter’s graduation ceremony. Dobrich told The Times the minister’s message was simple: “No matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ.”

The minister in question, the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, doesn’t deny what he said. In fact, he brags about it. “Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” Fike said. “The Bible encourages that. Ultimately, he [Jesus] is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”

Sounds like a nice sermon. It would have been great in a church. It has no place in a public school ceremony. In fact, the Supreme Court said exactly that in 1992’s Lee v. Weisman case. It is remarkable that 12 years after that ruling, this school district was still flagrantly violating it.

The fed-up family filed a lawsuit, and when word got out they were literally hounded out of town. A rabble-rousing right-wing radio talk show host, Dan Gaffney of WGMD in Rehoboth, inflamed the issue and implored people to pack an August 2004 school board meeting. They did, and as a result the family received several threats.

Here’s a sample of Gaffney charming rhetoric:

“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be.'”

His hateful campaign had the desired affect. Mona Dobrich and her two children fled to an apartment in Wilmington while her husband stayed behind. Maintaining two households has put quite strain on the family’s budget, and the older child, Samantha Dobrich, had to drop out of college.

Amazingly, WGMD’s website tries to make Gaffney, clearly a prize horse’s rear, sound like a genial morning-show host who cares about his community. The site asserts that Gaffney “approaches the mic every morning with a good heart and smile on his face, just as content to talk about the odd tent set up on the side of the road or a local’s new tattoo.” Gee, no mention of his talent for running Jews out of town?

Predictably, a right-wing legal group, the Rutherford Institute, has entered the fray to defend the school district. But here’s a surprise: The district has no case. The federal courts have been clear that public schools are not allowed to sponsor religion. Bush’s appointments haven’t changed that — yet. (For more on this disgraceful situation, see here)
http://www.jewsonfirst.org/06b/indianriver.html

If you’re like me, you get angry over situations like this. But take heart. The school district must know it has no case, as its attorneys have made settlement offers. Here’s hoping the matter will be settled out of court, with the district admitting it was in the wrong. They’ll need to correct the abuses by getting the staff out of the preaching business.

As for that nutty old Dan Gaffney, maybe someone should explain to him that if a community’s “traditions” are insensitive, boorish and unconstitutional, they can and will be changed — by force of law if necessary. Someone might also tell him that loving your community means you welcome everyone in it – even those who think and worship differently than you.

Ya know, we get upset (and rightfully so) about issues like this when it happens here, but I often read other liberal bloggers saying that it’s okay for people in the Mid-east to vote in a theocracy. To me, that’s not okay.

  • “No matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ.”

    OK, I’ll bite. The only way I read this statement is politically. As in,

    1. You are nothing if you don’t believe.
    2. Once you believe, we can control you and what you think.

    No mention of love thy neighbor. No mention of treating people with respect and dignity, no matter who they are. Since when did the Christian faith abandon these values? Sheesh…

    Ugh, I had to use the “V” word…

  • “What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be.”

    Wasn’t this the similar feeling in the South during the 1850s?

  • Theocracy, and anything approaching theocracy, is tribal: a grreat way of organizing primitive societies by suppressing individual members in the interest of the collective good. Most of us learned in kindergarten or first grade that there’s a wider world than the cozy confines of our own extended family, that civic life requires us to be civil toward others. People who insist that others somehow join their family (adopting its religion and superstitions) are retrograde, ignorant, intellectually deformed … and they deserve to be treated as such.

  • ocdemocrat,

    Actually, I’ve seen newsreels of former Georgia Senator Richard Russell in the 1950’s discussing civil rights and using those very arguments that you pulled above. Very creepy!

  • Unfortunately this tends to be standard fare in many small towns in America and less so in the larger urban areas. It’s easy to understand why: in small towns the reactionary Christian thugs can easily seize and hold power thanks in no small measure to the secular process of elections, an irony lost on them most likely. You’ll find them everywhere: on police forces, fire department rosters, school committees, public school administrations, town councils, and in school classrooms as well. The message is always the same. If you don’t drink the Christian Kool-Aid, shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. And the little turds can be vicious, too, as the Dobrich family found out.

    Full disclosure: I was the victim of a similar verbal attack some years ago. Fully two years after I graduated from high school in a small New England town, I was invited to participate in some sort of “meeting” to discuss issues supposedly related to my high school’s curriculum. Why I was invited was never clear and I was set up by another student that I had graduated with. Turns out the “meeting” consisted of me, this other student, the Superintendant of the school district at the time, and several faculty members from the school who during the course of the “meeting” said nothing. As it turns out the purpose of this ruse was to trick me into going to this meeting so that the self-inflating right-wing Christian gasbag superintendant could attempt to harrass and intimidate me. Why? I had made several comments loudly questioning the efficacy and truthfulness of the Christian religion and had verbally confronted one of the school’s Christian golden boys regarding his parroting of the Christian creation myths in my twelfth grade English class. This actually happened *two years* before this “meeting” took place. Needless to say I sussed out the actual intent of this “meeting” fairly quickly and the whole thing descended into name-calling vituperation. And the Christians are superior to the rest of us how, exactly? Can you imagine the type of monomania it took to hold on to that phony umbrage over comments I made two years hence, the planning that was involved for the sole purpose of trying to humiliate me, and the arrogance of the people involved in thinking that their conduct is acceptable or even admirable? I am more mad about it today than I was then.

    One thing is evermore clear: many Christians are complete assholes and should be treated that way. Hypocritical, self-important, smug assholes.

    It’s a fact.

  • Further proof of what happens after ten generations of southerners “keeping it in the family.” Interesting that southern, rural Delaware and southern, rural Iraq and southern, rural Afghanistan all seem to have something in common: Religious stupidity.

    But not everything…

    I’m sure there are people in southern rural Iraq and Afghanistan who are capable of speaking English, unlike these hillbillies.

  • “Ultimately, he [Jesus] is the one I have to please.”

    I’ve heard “love”, I’ve heard “serve”, and I’ve heard “obey”

    But never in the years of my Catholic upbringing have I ever heard anyone say they want to “please” Jesus.

    That just sounds sick and weird.

  • “We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change…..”

    Amazing. These were the same exact words that Southern racists used back in the ’50’s and ’60’s to try and stop the changes in society that were occuring then.

    Funny how the language of bigotry never changes, wherever it’s found.

  • When did Jesus ever say, “Please, please me?”

    Must be some part of the bible that I didn’t read. Either that or it was taken from a Beatles song.

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