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  • Prayer, Football, and Civil Religion in Texas0

    What's up with prayer and football in Texas and across the South? The big issue during the 1999 season was not the sometimes observed prayer in the end zones by players, but prayer over the intercom before games. In midseason the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that would decide whether such prayers

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  • Once Upon a First Amendment0

    Six-year-old Zachary Hood was happy at this chance to be recognized for his good reading performance. He and the other students in the first-grade class at Haines School in Medford, New Jersey, would be allowed to read a story to their classmates. Zachary initially selected Dr. Suess's The Cat in the Hat, but decided that

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  • Obiter0

    Anthony told me about the routine: he was stripped naked, his hands and ankles were lashed together, a pole was threaded between his ankles, and he was hoisted up to hang head down. Then they beat the soles of his feet, sometimes for hours, until they were swollen and finally insensitive to pain. He told

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  • Is Nothing Secular?0

    Whatever else it achieves, the presidential campaign of 2000 will be remembered as the time in American politics when the wall separating church and state began to collapse. George W. Bush set the tone by raising the likelihood of his candidacy after a prayer breakfast and later declaring that his favorite political philosopher was "Christ,

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  • God of Our Mottoes0

    Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the famous atheist, tried unsuccessfully before her death to remove "In God We Trust" from currency and to stop jurors from saying "so help me God." Several organizations and Internet Web sites remain dedicated to the banishment of the phrase, but the High Court has not accepted any cases that offer a

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  • The Poisoned Chalice0

    Pat continued to stake out that position. But as a guest on that show back in 1998 I felt duty-bound to remind the conservative firebrand that just four years earlier a nationally syndicated columnist had written "The reason voters in 16 states rejected voucher proposals on the ballot was because they didn't want the 'poisoned

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