ACLU Vs. Prayer

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU Vs. Prayer

The ACLU finds Christian prayer a threat to society and they sure do fight it every chance they get. Here is some of the latest:

    A divided federal appeals court panel issued a ruling that may allow the Tangipahoa Parish school board to open its meetings with a nonsectarian prayer, and opened up a new chapter in a long dispute between school officials and the American Civil Liberties Union.

    The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the school board should be treated like other elected bodies, which are allowed to invoke nonsectarian and non-proselytizing prayers at their meetings.

    But the panel upheld a district judge’s view that the Tangipahoa board’s previous practice of prayer violated the constitutional ban on government promotion of religion. Since that ruling in February, 2005, the school board has not opened its meetings with a devotional.

The ACLU went on a relentless crusade against the Tangipahoa Parish School Board starting in October of 2003. They filed their third lawsuit against the school district in nine years. The first two lawsuits successfully prohibited prayers during football games and prevented biology teachers from teaching creationism. The third one sought to prohibit the board members from opening their meetings with prayer.

In 2005 the ACLU convinced a sympathetic judge to censor the school board’s freedom of expression. The following month, after the ACLU learned of several instances of prayer, Joe Cook, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, dubbed the board’s allowance of prayer “un-American and immoral.”

In May of 2005, the ACLU filed a motion to hold various employees of the board in contempt of court for “praying illegally” at school functions. They requested that the prayers “must result in the district employees’ removal from society.” They urged the court to send them to jail. They stated, “Anything short of actual imprisonment would be ineffective to sending that message to these individuals.”

All of this is quite chilling to those of us that believe in freedom of speech and religious expression. Joe Cook exemplified the ACLU’s overzealous hostility towards religious expression in this particular fight, comparing the school board’s desire to pray to terrorists.

“They believe that they answer to a higher power, in my opinion. Which is the kind of thinking that you had with the people who flew the airplanes into the buildings in this country, and the people who did the kind of things in London.”

Now it looks like the outcome is landing somewhere in a murky grey area where they will be allowed to pray a sanitized, watered down and politically correct kind of prayer. While the ACLU may think they are protecting speech, many feel they are being censored.

    “If it is like it seems, you can pray, but only generally,” said Sandra Bailey-Simmons, the school board president. “It looks like censorship.”

    She said the majority of people in Tangipahoa are Christians and want the board to be able to invoke Christianity at its meetings. She said she was interested in appealing the decision.

    Likewise, Joe Cook, the executive director of the Louisiana branch of the ACLU, said the ACLU may seek a rehearing or appeal.

The courts normally base their decisions on precedent. In so doing in the cases on prayer they continually overlook the precedents set by our founding fathers in the prayers that they did in public and while in a public office.

While continually bringing lawsuits against those that pray in the name of Jesus they continue to bring law suits that support islam, pagans and other cults in being able to pray according to their beliefs.

Examples:

1. Simpson v. Chesterfield Co. (VA) Where a Wiccan Priestess insisted on giving the prayer before a public board meeting and the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors turned down her offer.

2. August 17, 2000, Denver International Airport. The local chapter of the ACLU supported a registered complaint against the airport because the airport announced over the public address system the Catholic Mass Schedule. On December 5, 2000, the airport stopped the public service announcements due to ACLU pressure.

3. The ACLU recently has brought a lawsuit against Wilson County schools for allowing "See You at the Pole" a voluntary prayer event held around the schools flag pole before school even started for the day. Yet during the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, teachers in Metro Nashville schools were actually ordered to release Muslim students from class at certain times --  to go to unused classrooms or offices -- so that they could attend to their Muslim prayers.


The list can go on and on. All of this is definitive proof that the ACLU is not supporting freedom of speech but rather censorship of Christians.

[Shammu]

Where's the ACLU when you need it?

For years, America's government schools have been told by the courts and the secular jihadists at the American Civil Liberties Union that any vestige of Christianity or Judaism must be eradicated.

A top textbook consultant shaping classroom education on Islam in American public schools recently worked for a school funded and controlled by the Saudi government, which propagates a rigidly anti-Western strain of Islam. The consultant, Susan L. Douglass, has also praised Pakistan's madrassa schools as "proud symbols of learning," even after the U.S. government blamed them for fueling the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The ACLU is uncharacteristically mute.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton, a Clinton appointee, dismissed the lawsuit against the Byron Union School District, arguing the Muslim unit does not promote religion, and therefore does not violate the First Amendment's clause against religious establishment.

The controversial role-playing course requires kids to recite Muslim prayers and verses of the Quran in class. Students also are required to give up things like watching television or eating candy for a day to simulate Islamic fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"From the beginning, you and your classmates will become Muslims," the Student Guide portion of the Islam module instructs seventh-graders as an introduction to the material.

Just imagine substituting practices associated with Christianity or Judaism in such a course without the ACLU squealing in horror. It's unthinkable.

What's happening here is clear: There's an unholy alliance emerging between the bird-brained, selectively intolerant secular jihadists and those Islamists who would like to use the Judeo-Christian-inspired American freedoms to undermine American freedoms.

They can't see that they would not survive five minutes in their brave old world of the 7th century. They can't see that the freedom they love so much can only survive in a society operating on Judeo-Christian principles and populated by people who believe in those principles.

If people can't see this glaring double-standard at work in America, there is very little point to fighting Islamic terrorism abroad. It's just a matter of time before the enemy within achieves victory by default.