What’s Wrong with the World

Being one who has chosen homeschooling and private classical Christian schooling for his children, I have been one of a growing number that have opted out of participation in public schools. This development leads me not to cry for the same opportunities for Christians (and I'm not assuming that's your intent, Lydia) but perhaps an opportunity for Christians to make a case for opting out of financing (via state taxes) public school. Could not a case now be made by a NY state Christian, that payment of that portion of state taxes designated for the support of the New York City Department of Education constitutes a violation of religious freedom on the part of the taxpayer?

Hi, Jon,

As you know, of course, I was simply remarking on the irony of the whole thing, and on the alarming nature of the Islamicization of public life in the U.S. I wasn't, certainly, suggesting that such a "Christian culture" public school would be a good idea. In fact, I'm sure that if (when pigs fly) such a thing were set up, it would be under only the strictest controls so that nothing could be said that would actually appear to endorse Christianity. Meanwhile, I have little doubt that a great deal of the teaching of Islam as true will go on at the school in Brooklyn headed by "Debbie." So the double standard would of course be carried right down to the ground, and the public funding of any Christian school entity--including by vouchers, IMO--is to be avoided as it would undoubtedly be corrupting in nature.

To answer your question, of course the pretense will be maintained that this is all simply "educational," that they are simply teaching _about_ "Muslim culture" and so forth in an informational fashion. I doubt those setting this thing up would admit otherwise even if, a couple of years down the line, we were to obtain a videotape of children kneeling in prayer all over the school several times a day, led by teachers. There was a case recently in CA (don't have time to look it up) where students in a public school were actually made to take Muslim names and do various other forms of religious activities (I believe this included prayers to Allah) as part of an "educational" unit, and it was deemed not to be an establishment of religion but merely to have been educational play-acting. That fiction will be maintained here as well. Part of my reason for making the Christian parallel was simply to point out not only the double standard but the hypocrisy of all of this.

So the upshot is that any Christian who tried to make the case you mention would have the case thrown out because to allow his suit would be, de facto, to admit that what is being done is an establishment of the Islamic religion in that school.

Honestly, I think a suit would have a better chance with the ceremonial foot-washing basins. These are undeniably religious in nature and are permanent fixtures of the bathrooms in question. I mean, there they are, a physical fact. I'm having trouble thinking of a Christian parallel. Perhaps a stash of rosaries provided by the Kansas City Department of Transportation to be handed out to nervous taxicab patrons? :-)

The issue is that tax payer dollars are being used to fund public education. Education is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution; so I would favor a wall of seperation between the school and the state.

The same for airports. Who cares how they are managed and what they provide for taxi drivers as long as I am not funding it.

The trouble is the federal and state governments have expanded beyond their logical sphere. Education is porperly the province of the family. If they wish to delegate it to a private school, or a church related school, school or home school that should be parents business. Not the States.

Airposrts should be part of the private business sector. They should not be taxpayer funded.

Yes, if you go full-scale 10th Amendment route, then the DOE should have been shut down long ago. But even if you do that, local taxes (property taxes) will usually be used to fund local public schools. That's not going to be shut-down-able just by following the 10th Amendment. In Michigan, for example, the state constitution builds right in state control of and support for public education, so it would take a state constitutional amendment even to get the state gov. out of education, and then you'd have to fight town-by-town to shut down the property tax funding of local public schools. I'm afraid it isn't likely to happen.

How exactly airports got run by the cities they are part of, I'm not sure, but I'm quite sure they are. Meanwhile, since that's unlikely to change, I'd _really_ like them not to have the Muslim foot-basins in the bathrooms.

Speaking for myself, something will seem awry to me when large employers start providing Muslim prayer rooms on site even though I'm not paying for them. It isn't as bad as if I were, but something is still very strange. Let's face it: There's an aspect of intimidation here. Christian employees may want to meet on lunch break or before work hours to pray, but they don't demand that the physical plant be modified for them. Muslims do. They're always one jump ahead in demanding that society acommodate them. Sometimes the threat is of suit for a failure of "religious accommodation" or for "discrimination," and our gov. is too often a willing participant there. Sometimes there is just a vaguer sort of bullying. One woman got on TV because she was down on her hands and knees praying at a gym in the way of someone else's locker and the other person [gasp!] _interrupted_ her prayer asking to be allowed into her own locker. The manager of the gym was not sympathetic to the interrupted pray-er, and the news made it sound like the woman praying in the way of the locker was the victim of the whole situation. Who knows what sort of apology will be demanded of the gym, and what they will give. And there's always the notion of violence behind it all. This goes down all the way to the following level, which I may feature in a later post: 9 and 10 year old children in a Dutch school began trashing the classroom when the teacher began teaching a unit on "life on the farm" and got to talking about pigs. I am not making this up. So, of _course_, the unit on farm life was scrapped.

Yes, the irony of your commentary was certainly apparent. You are undoubtedly correct in asserting what you have about the government never admitting anything it does is an establishment of religion - be it Islam or secular humanism.

By the way, I apologize for my inadvertent presumption in using your first name like that, Mrs. McGrew. I should have better manners. What's wrong with the world (and me), indeed. :-)

That's not going to be shut-down-able just by following the 10th Amendment.

The 10th Amendment route wouldn't hurt, but of larger impact to the entire venture would be Christian parents across the country waking up and opting out all together. Funds are typically allocated to schools by a proportion of how many students are enrolled. Simple obedience to the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) on the part of God's people would cause the system to crumble before our eyes. If only His people would obey.

Dear Mr. Luker,

You are the second person within a week to apologize to me for using my first name when I had in fact been entirely happy for him to do so. Am I sending out "Call me Mrs. McGrew" vibes or something? :-) But you did better. You said "Mrs." when apologizing, and he said "Ms." :-) Honestly, I don't mind in the least. And the last thing we want to be at WWWTW is stuffy. But it's nice to be surrounded by gentlemen.

The govt. at some level would still be able to coerce support from the Christian parents in the form of property taxes even if they all pulled their kids out of the public schools. What would be most affected would be allocations of federal dollars. But there were public schools before the federal government gave out huge sums of money for the same. Some belt-tightening would be required, but that would be about it. After all, a lot of Christian parents went with Christian schools in the big Christian school movement of the 70's, and unfortunately the public school system was not greatly affected. In fact, it didn't even reform itself educationally to try to win them back.

But we should get out of the public schools even if we have to go on supporting them. It's well worth it. I cannot understand Christian parents who don't. And now we will see the oddest and eeriest mix of Islam and secular humanism you can imagine. Look to the situation in Britain (where they serve halal meat in public schools now) for a model of where we are headed. One British girl was arrested for having asked to be placed in a different working group because all the others in her assigned group were speaking a language she could not understand (apparently Urdu). The police in England take reported "racist incidents" by school children very seriously indeed. In Australia a convicted pedophile has sued the prison system because he was not served halal meat while in prison. And so on. We will see these things in the private sphere as well, but they will begin in the public institutions, especially the schools, first.

Informational question: I've seen it alleged that halal (Muslim kosher) meat is not simply killed in a particular way but also has some sort of prayer or blessing said over it. Web searching has been unable to confirm or disconfirm this. Does anyone know?

Dr. McGrew;

The 9th and 10th Ammendments if in force would certainly limit the intrusion of the civil state beyond its natural sphere.

Your reference to the support of education in the State of Michigan Constitution, shows that document is part of what is wrong with the world.

The problem as I see it is that the civil state has saw fit to impose itself into a sphere that naturally should be left to the sphere of the family. Primary and secondary education should be part of the sphere of the family. Such education should be controlled by parents. One of the major responcibilities of parents is to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The sphere of the civil state should be to provide for a system of justice and provide for mutual defence. The magistrate bears the sword to suppress wrong doing. When the state goes beyond that it intrudes into other societal spheres.

Mr. Yeutter,

What can I say but that I agree heartily with your comments on the topic of sphere sovereignty? I don't know whether we would agree in our interp. of the 9th Amendment or not. My own inclination there is to see the unenumerated rights as left to the people to enumerate by their representatives--i.e., to the legislative branch rather than the judicial branch.

By the way, all: I have done a little more looking about and answered my own question on halal meat. The animal is slaughtered while a prayer to Allah is said, one modern concession being to allow a tape recorded prayer to be played during the slaughter. It seems to me that, as public and private entities move towards offering this to everybody (I have read that McDonald's in certain parts of Australia, I believe it is, now has all halal meat), we will have to return to the consideration of a very ancient issue for the Christian church--meat offered to idols.

I believe I agree with Lydia: the 9th and 10th Amendments, properly interpreted, do not bind the several states, but rather bind the federal government from encroaching on state business.

I am open to an argument along the lines delineated by Mr. Yeutter; but I do not believe his strict principle of decentralism can be discerned in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Those amendments concern relations between the federal government and the several states, binding the former to empower the latter. They are not, strictly speaking, concerned with relations of the several states to local governments or individual families.

I must register a mild demurral, not on a point of substance regarding the funding of public education and the role of government in education, but on the matter of the irony of creeping Islamization occurring concurrently with resistance to even token acknowledgments of Christianity. There is a consistent political theory in play in these situations, although it is seldom recognized as such, leftist political theory having devolved into a mishmash of multiculturalist blather often lacking a coherent theoretical foundation. The theory is that of repressive tolerance, and it was one of the hallmarks of the New Left of the Sixties and early Seventies. The 'repression' obtains insofar as movements of resistance accord the 'establishment' toleration as a series of viewpoints and institutions deserving of fundamental respect; the sheer institutional inertia of the hegemonic white Christian, Eurocentric permits the 'suppression' of dissident viewpoints, which are inhibited from appearing as the vanguards of the progressive future that they are, being portrayed as fringe and crankish. Hence, the directionality of toleration must be reversed; toleration must be extended to everything that stands opposed to everything the West has been historically, while intolerance is the lot of the historic substance of the West.

The left seldom formulates its ideology so explicitly any longer, leaving repressive toleration as an enduring ideological legacy that is so unquestioned that it need never be acknowledged openly. It has become instinctual; expressive of a full formation in a mode of life. Nevertheless, this is the animating principle of the aforementioned ironies: Christianity must be disfavoured because it was the constitutive principle of the oppressive past, while anything inimical thereto must be favoured, in order that the dissolution of the irremediably corrupt present might be hastened.

I'll believe you, Maximos, on the explicitness with which this was formulated in the 60's and 70's. But the law is supposed to be neutral on such matters. If, for example, we aren't supposed to have a state religion, it's just as much contrary to the first amendment intent of the founders for that religion to be Islam (gad! imagine what they'd say!) as for it to be, say, the Church of England. Muslims are extremely explicit that their goal is to establish an Islamic state, and this sort of ideological reverse discrimination you accurately describe is playing right into the hands of that. It is of course consistent with the post-modern, anything-but-the-West ideology you describe. But these leftist fools will get something they didn't bargain for when liquor store owners start being beaten up and woman beaten on the street by thugs for not covering their hair. We're already moving in that direction in some European countries.

Lydia,

The denizens of the left wastes believe that they will succeed in domesticating Islam, having once employed it as a demolitions campaign against traditional Western societies; European leftist political factions ally with Muslim populations not only because they realize that this is a ticket to electoral success, but because they actually believe, having deluded themselves, that they will succeed in incorporating Islam into the multiculturalist, managerialist, interest-party politics in which they specialize.

And as for the question of state religions, I suppose that I can only offer the ambiguous remark that the absence of official religion is one thing; but a society must be avowedly one thing or another, for, if it is not, that state of neutrality will be nothing more than a phase of transition. If one cannot serve both God and Mammon, neither can a nation both remain what it is, and pretend not to be that thing.

It seems to me that at the top of the list of "What's wrong with the World" is the disunity of the Church. When I was a boy and my father would take my brothers and me out to cut firewood and place it in the truck, he would frequently remind us, "Never step over wood to get to wood." And so I do not step over the Church to get to the world. Perhaps the problems in the former bear some responsibility for the problems in the latter. If judgment begins with the family of God, then the primary problem in the Church goes at the top of my list.