Those adamant about imposing religious exercises in public schools in Alabama now have the children to sanctify their cause. Across the state, students are protesting, holding rallies, and even walking out of classes-all over the injunction by a federal district judge prohibiting public schools from promoting religious activity in the classroom. One can wonder how many Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Jehovah's Witness, or Rastafarian students (citizens who, last we heard, are protected by the Bill of Rights from religious coercion) are among those taking part in this children's crusade south of the Mason-Dixon line. Probably not many; instead, the crowds surely are composed of assorted Protestants (maybe a few Catholics thrown in)-those whose theology dominates the prayer, devotions, and religious exercises that Judge Ira DeMent was morally and legally obligated to ban. Never mind that these students can pray all they want in school, can read their Bibles in school, can have private devotions with other students in school, can even use school property to hold after-school religious meetings, and can talk about their faith in school subject to the same reasonable restrictions placed on other verbal activities. All that they are asked to do, and all that the judge's ruling demands, is that they respect the rights of those students-Buddhists, Muslim, Jewish, Jehovah's Witnesses, Rastafarian, atheist, sun-worshipers-who might not appreciate being subjected to religious exercises that offend their sensibilities, especially since these students are required by law to attend public school.

Interestingly enough, Liberty (see Op. Cit., March/April) was attacked for insinuating that Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, supported legislated religious exercises in school, when according to the letter to the editor, he didn't. Well, in his February issue, Neuhaus comes out squarely against Judge DeMent's ruling. "It should be obvious to all," he wrote, "that Judge Dement's order is doing precisely what the federal government is constitutionally forbidden to do, namely, interfering with the free exercise of religion. . . . Nor shall the federal courts, or so it was thought until Everson (1947) and its judicial progeny."

First of all, it was Cantwell (1940), not Everson, that incorporated the Free Exercise Clause (via the Fourteenth Amendment). Secondly, the issue in Alabama isn't a free exercise but an establishment issue-a crucial distinction but one that those who want legislated religion in public schools need to blur (after all, making it sound like kids are being denied the right to practice their faith produces good sound bites). The truth is that laws forbidding the students from holding devotional exercises in public school no more violate their free exercise of religion than do laws forbidding them from spray painting Dokken rock lyrics across the town hall violate their free speech rights. The free exercise of religion doesn't mean one is free to exercise religion in ways that infringe upon the basic rights of others, which is what these devotions were doing and what Judge Dement's order stops.

It's kind of ironic that Neuhaus, a Catholic priest, takes this position, especially when in the last century the little religious violence that ever tainted the United States did so because Catholic kids objected to the same kind of religious exercises in public schools that Father Neuhaus now deems protected by the U.S. Constitution. No doubt, just as in the last century, those in the streets seeking to keep religious exercises in public schools weren't Catholics, those in the streets seeking the same in Alabama aren't Jews, Buddhists, or Muslims. That's a point one would think Neuhaus, a Catholic, would be sensitive to. But, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man, it's all too common that those groups crying for liberty of conscience and religious freedom are usually just crying for the liberty of their own conscience and freedom for their own religious practices, and once they get it they are manifestly insensitive to the freedoms of others. Using British history as an example, Niebuhr wrote that Presbyterianism "pled for liberty of conscience when it was itself in danger of persecution; and threatened all other denominations with suppression when it had the authority to do so."

Neuhaus, fortunately, doesn't have the authority. What his attitude does show, however, is what he would do if he ever did.

Five Righteous Men?

At Yale, five orthodox Jewish males refuse to live in the college dorms because of the prevalence of women who spend the night with their boyfriends or the one-night stands. The Yale Five, as they are dubbed, aren't asking that the school impose any kind of draconian morality on the campus and ban women from sleeping in the men's dorm (heaven forbid!); instead, all they want to do is live elsewhere where they don't have to walk into the men's room in the morning and find women there. The school said they could move out, but only after they cough up the $7,000-a-year cost for a dorm room, which these modern Shadrachs, Meshachs, and Abednegos refuse to do. The boys offered a compromise: assignment to single-sex suites with the university expelling those who violate the code. Of course, that would be enforcing sexual morality on a college campus, something that a progressive college like Yale could never do, and so the five have filed suit in federal court, asking only that the government stop Yale from enforcing its immorality upon them. Who knows what will happen, but in post-RFRA America, the five Hebrew worthies are likely to get tossed in the fiery furnace anyway.

Disestablishing the Establishment Clause

Not since the 1970s, when Congress voted (against) a prayer amendment to the U.S. Constitution, has the House been asked to vote on any kind of amendment that would radically alter the basic principles of the religion clauses. This March all that changed, when the House Judiciary committee, in a 16 to 11 vote along strict party lines (Republicans pro, Democrats con) approved Representative Ernest Ishtook's misnamed "Religious Freedom Amendment," which will now face the full House for a vote anytime. If this bill ever became the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it would essentially undo all the Establishment Clause protections that Americans have enjoyed since it was incorporated against the states in Everson. It would do to the First Amendment what the Twenty-first did to the Eighteenth-and that is, essentially, repeal it.

Americans shouldn't be fooled by the language of the proposal, which states specifically that "Neither the United States nor any State shall establish any official religion." If interpreted the way proponents want it interpreted, this amendment would allow practices that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled do, indeed, establish an official religion.

The bill, for example, says that the right to pray in public schools "shall not be infringed." First, this language implies that children don't have that right to begin with, which is false. That right has never been infringed. What has been infringed is their "right" to pray in school in ways that infringe upon the freedom of others, a prohibition that has been a pillar of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and rightly so. If passed, this amendment would then allow for the majority religion to impose its forms of worship, prayer, and doctrine upon others. The bill's guarantee that no person shall be required to "join in school prayer or other religious activity" is not protection of religious freedom. On the contrary, in numerous rulings, the Supreme Court has said that merely pressuring a person, especially a child, to partake of, or even be exposed to, forms of worship that offend them, is an establishment of religion. That a Muslim child isn't forced to pray to Jesus or to sing hymns honoring the Trinity, but is merely required by law to sit there and listen to them while the rest of the class does, isn't what religious freedom in America is about. Excusing kids from the exercises isn't a solution, either. As a New York Times editorial in 1962 said regarding Engle: "The establishment clause is a keystone of American liberty: and if there is one thing that the establishment clause must mean, it is that government may not set up a religious norm from which one has to be excused-as was the case with the children in the New York school who did not wish to recite the prayer." And as will be the case with thousands of other children, not just in New York, but all over America, if the Ishtook bill ever became part and parcel of the United States Constitution.

That such a bill could even make it to the House floor is a testimony to the clout of the Religious Right, which, according to critics, wants a vote taken on this issue in time for the Christian Coalition's voter guides to be distributed before House elections this November. After all, what Republican (many of whom might even owe their seat to Christian Right support) wants to be listed in a voter guide as "against" prayer in school or against "religious freedom"? Fortunately, there appears to be enough of them, so that the bill isn't likely to muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass the House, much less the Senate-where the needed two-thirds is even less likely-and then on to the states for ratification (it must pass three-fourths of the states before it can become part of the U.S. Constitution).

It's times like these that Americans should marvel at the wisdom-and the foresight-of its Founders, who made the amendment process a difficult one, precisely to protect the nation against the kind of proposal that will soon be voted and-we can pray-killed on the House floor.