Prayer Warriors

Your May/June issue is very stimulating, interesting, and witty. Since the feature story is "Alabama's Religious War," you can imagine how I immediately focussed on that.

Thanks for championing the civil rights issues!

And be sure to give the person or persons who design your covers a special award. I think that your covers are just great, especially the May/June issue, but also the March/April issue and the May/June issue of 1997.

You render an invaluable service to us all.

HAROLD B. KNOX, Pastor

Five Mile Presbyterian Church

Birmingham, Alabama

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I am a retired lawyer and judge, a former state legislator in Alabama, a member of the Alabama ACLU and fervently committed to upholding the First Amendment. I almost always read Liberty magazine from cover to cover, and your latest issue dealing with religious liberty problems in our state was, in my opinion, "right on."

As I am sure you know, Fob James won the Republican primary. Undoubtedly, the issues raised in your May/June issue are going to be major matters of discussion and demagoguery in the upcoming general election. The Democratic nominee will, I am sure, be under great pressure to move toward Mr. James's position. The same will be true of many candidates for the state legislature. The congressman from this district recently shocked me by voting in favor of the school prayer amendment. Those of us who are opposed to this trend need to be able to attack it in a forceful but simple way, and I am sure that you know better than I do that this is not always easy.

HARTWELL B. LUTZ

Gurley, Alabama

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I enjoyed your May/June issue with its focus on the school prayer debate currently unfolding in Alabama. While your position splits the theoretic fine hairs and is undoubtedly the correct one for intellectuals, I tend to agree with the majority of Alabamans who are battling the tryanny of the Courts. Yes, the Supreme Court has defined what is and is not allowed in public schools, but its decisions do not necessarily reflect what is written in the Constitution. Whatever one may say in the debate, and whatever theories are forwarded and espoused, I strongly believe that the Founding Fathers, who wrote the "Godless Constitution," would nevertheless be horrified to discover that the posting of the Ten Commandments is verboten in the classroom or any other public place. Whatever the faults, shortcomings, and potential dangers of allowing some official recognition of religion, those dangers, faults, and shortcomings would have to be severe indeed to surpass the abominable and downright dangerous conditions in our public schools today. It takes no rocket scientist to see that the deterioration of the public school system correlates almost uncannily with the outlawing of official prayer and other religious expression in the public schools.

Even more chilling, in my opinion, is the stationing in Alabama schools of federal "monitors" to ensure that no prayers are spoken in an official manner. I wonder what kind of people those monitors are and what they would do if they actually had to produce something instead of draining our resources. Once again, could the Founding Fathers have envisioned this? Not in their wildest dreams or worst nightmares.

In 1997, I graduated from The Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which until then was a private school. Since that time, Dickinson has been taken over by and is now a branch of the Pennsylvania State University, which is publicly funded in part. At the graduation ceremony on June 6, 1998, for the first time in anyone's memory, and probably for the first time since its inception in 1834, there was no convocation prayer at the graduation ceremony at the Dickinson School of Law. That is truly a tragedy, but one that would no doubt be explained away and even cheered by the likes of your scholarly journal.

IRA WAGLER

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

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Take my name off your mailing list for Liberty magazine. I disagree with almost everything you stand for. I am for bringing God and decency back into our national life. If you had ever read history, the First Amendment was intended only to prevent the establishment of a single national church. It did not even refer to the rights of individual states.

If one had to go–the Bible or the Constitution–I would vote for the Constitution.

Your article on the efforts of Christians to bring back prayer in schools in Alabama was especially detestable.

Go to your Saturday non-conformist meetings and leave historic Christianity alone.

Rev. VICTOR H. MORGAN

St. Luke's Church

Blue Ridge, Georgia

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Concerning your recent issue on the legislative exploits of Judge Ira DeMent, kudos on your remarkable dexterity in showing, without a dissenting voice, the seamy side of religious expression in the schools.

All who love liberty must know that faith is the one type of speech that has absolutely no right to offend. In any public high school, on any given day, one may encounter personal insult, lewd gestures, disputation, name-calling, derogatory remarks, public display of affection, teasing, blasphemy, provocative attire, sexist language, pornography, occult symbols, historical-revisionist texts, slanderous insinuation, and the advocacy of various philosophies, some of them perverse; but these are not generally jailable offenses. Such assault on conservative sensibilities does not, of course, merit legislative remedy. Only the public exercise of the faith of our fathers calls for penal intimidation–yes, even when student-initiated.

Shame on those who insist on making others uncomfortable by exercising their so-called First Amendment rights! As is well known, Jesus Himself was totally innocuous, never arousing controversy or causing offense; and now, thank God, at least in DeKalb County, Alabama, His teenage followers are compelled, by legislative fiat, to follow His example. Hurrah! We simply cannot allow incitement to reverence. In this day and age, why should some enlightened young soul have to shudder through a "God bless you" from some naive coed? How dare we, in this free land, permit the pride of the pagans to be sullied with the prayers of the pious? How can we sacrifice the religious liberty of some skeptical dissenter by forcing them to overhear a student-led hymn in (horrors!) A classroom, otherwise dedicated to the goddess of reason?

My heart was fed with this great steaming bowl of chicken soup for the non-Christian soul. You cannot imagine my surprise and delight to find that you had broken new ground in your journal by condoning the use of force against those who pray! As a vigilant member of the secular thought police, I nominate you to our hall of fame. Please continue to enlighten us regarding the religious despotism which threatens to overwhelm our public schools.

TIM CROSBY

Hagerstown, Maryland

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Christian Science, Again

In your May/June issue Christian Science lawyers and public relations managers blandly dismiss the preventable deaths of children in their church and ask the public to do likewise. But these children suffer horribly. Toddler Robyn Twitchell was vomiting his own feces and even his mother told investigators he was in severe pain. He was so dehydrated that his skin stayed up when pinched. Autopsy photos showed bright red lips and chin, likely because the acid in the vomit had eaten the skin off. Christian Science teaches that you have to believe you are getting a spiritual healing in order to get one, so members feel a heavy moral demand to trivilaize and reinterpret symptoms. The Christian Science practitioner even testified at trial that she achieved a complete healing of Robyn and that he ran around happily chasing his kitty cat fifteen minutes before he died. Physicians testified that he would have been nearly comatose throughout the day of his death.

But church officials argue they should be allowed to deprive children of medical care because medicine fails too. The death of Heather O'Rourke from a bowel obstruction excuses Robyn Twitchell's death, they claim. A medically trained person would certanly have to study records for the children before their deaths could be compared.

The church claims that both Christian Science and medical science should have equal legal status as "system[s] of heath care" because Christian Scientists respect the sincerity of physicians and because some scholarls are today studying the effect of spirituality on physical health.

Who is being narrow-minded here? It is Christian Science which teaches that you cannot have both God and a doctor. In a briefing to the U.S. Supreme Court, a Christian Science mother stated, "Christian Science provides that no person may become a member of the Church unless he or she is prepared to rely completely on spiritual healing as practiced in Christian Science. Members of the Church believe that attempts to use medical means … in combination with spiritual means destroy a Christian Scientist's power to heal through prayer. Thus, spiritual healing is … a religious imperative for members of the Church. (Petition for Writ of Certiorari, Walker v. Superior Court of Sacramento County, [U.S.S. Ct. 88-1471, 1989].

Church attorney Georgatos dismisses the impact of the religious exemption mandate it got the federal government to impose on the states. She claims that states were already adding religious exemption on their own because legislators made an informed decision that Christian Science heals disease as effectively as medical science. The facts are, however, that in 1975 when the federal government began forcing states to pass religious exemptions to child neglect, only 11 states had such exemptions. Eight years later virtually all states had them.

The church also claims that it is constitutional for Medicare and Medicaid to pay for unlicensed Christian Science nurses because Congress has removed words "Christian Science" from the statutes and substituted "religious non-medical health care." We wish to point out that our organization has filed a suit challenging the new statutes. A ruling is expected this summer.

In the April issue of Pediatrics pediatrician Seth Asser and I review 172 deaths of children after medical care was withheld on religious grounds. We found that 140 fatalities were from conditions for which survival rates with medical care would have exceeded 90%. The U.S. Supreme Court, as your original article cited, has wisely held that parents do not have a First Amendment right deprive children of the necessities of life.

RITA SWAN

Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, Inc.

Sioux City, Iowa

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Islamophobia

It was interesting to read Mr. Omer Bin Abdullah's article on "Islamophobia" in your March/April issue.

It is unfortunate that in the USA, which is supposed to be a Christian nation, we have this prejudice against Islam. But in the light of the way Islam treats others in the world we really cannot expect any different.

I have lived and worked in Islamic countries and I know what it is like to be followed continually by the police and interrogated from time to time for saying or doing certain things. I know what happens when a Muslim converts to Christianity. The family of one of our workers who did convert killed him. I have had the privilege of hiding some of these individuals in my house and helping them to escape the country to save their lives. Where is the fulfillment of the quotation he made from the Koran 49:13? And that is why I am writing under an assumed name in case my work takes me back to one of these countries. I will have to pay the price for writing this letter.

How about all the acts of terrorism that are done by Muslims? And now this latest group of Muslims was caught planning on interrupting the World Cup soccer matches with bombs. Can Mr. Omer Bin Abdullah expect any other kind of treatment with Muslims giving the world that kind of example? And he wonders why there is Islamophobia?

Until Islam has a change of attitude and treatment toward the rest of the world, I am afraid there will be no better treatment for Muslims–no matter where they live.

JOHN DOE