PAWTUCKET AND CRANSTON ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT
by Mark McBurney

Cranston’s residents acted unchristianly when the Federal Court ruled January 11 that Cranston West’s High School prayer banner violated the 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Sixteen year old plaintiff Jessica Ahlquist received hate mail and death threats, a state representative called her “an evil little thing” and even local flower shops refused to make deliveries to her. The national news media (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News) fairly portrayed Cranston as “throbbing with raw emotion.” It was not Cranston’s, or Catholicism’s, finest hour.

Pawtucket’s turn in the First Amendment limelight is next. Two similar First Amendment Establishment Clause cases are pending in RI Federal District Court, both dealing with the City’s policy of covertly providing preferential and free use of athletic fields to St. Raphael Academy since 1967. While it is hard to imagine St. Ray’s parents behaving as badly as Cranston’s, it won’t take much for the national news media to come swooping back.

Litigation was eminently avoidable: If Mayor Grebien hadn’t flip-flopped on the issue once he got into office, or if he now changed a single word in City policy; if Pawtucket City Councilors had shown an ounce of leadership instead of going Missing in Action; if Bishop Tobin had simply instructed St. Rays to stop taking subsidies from a near-bankrupt city; if St. Rays had paid token rent to use our fields instead of building itself a multi-million dollar gym it refuses to share. Each juncture offered an opportunity to avoid litigation. Each time, these ‘leaders’ thumbed their nose, rolled the dice and sacrificed the First Amendment for their own advancement. And why not? Like Wall Street Bankers, they are gambling with our money, not theirs. If Pawtucket gets embarrassed, like Cranston, they just don’t care.

It seems as if RI cities only make national news for their misdeeds (bankruptcy, corruption, death threats against teen agers, reactionary “Christian” rage). It would be a shame if Pawtucket joined that ilk for an issue so easily avoidable. With a $13 million dollar debt, we shouldn’t be subsidizing anything, least of all a religion in violating of the First Amendment. If a Muslim school asked for taxpayer subsidies the same way that St. Rays has demanded them for the last 50 years, would City leaders, or St. Ray’s parents, be as generous? We might just find out.

(The author is lead attorney in Arneson vs. Grebien, one of the two First Amendment suits against Pawtucket pending in RI Federal District Court).

I’ve read the comments both in the Providence Journal and in other forums. Discounting the disgusting attacks and the barely disguised bigotry, there is still a clear and vocal population who object to the outcome itself. Their objections, from what I can tell, do not center on the facts of the case. The facts are simple and undisputed. The objections also do not center on the technical matters of the ruling. The law itself, as well as the legal precedent all the way up to the Supreme Court are abundantly clear. There was little space for opinion in the judge’s ruling. He identified the relavent facts, applied existing legal precedent, and turned the crank.

An appeal is a complete waste of time. This outcome is a result of current law applied to actual facts. Nobody is claiming that the facts are different, or that the law was incorrectly applied.

I think that the community objects to the law itself. There seems to be a vocal minority who think that public schools should be allowed to have a school prayer on the wall. They say that, far from being a historical artifact, that prayer should be respected as a symbol of the school. Part of the community yearns for a return to an imagined time when civic life in Cranston was explicitly Christian. I read the commentary as saying that public schools, and government at large, should acknowledge and endorse the majority religion. Minority groups, including atheists, should certainly be tolerated, but we should know our place and accept that place with gratitude. Gratitude and, more importantly, silence.

I disagree with this perspective rather strongly, but it’s good to clarify what they’re saying. I encourage them to skip the appeal, leave the school board out of it, and pursue a constitutional amendment to change the law.

I think that the school board should vote to not appeal the decision. Their role as elected public servants is to run the school district as best they can in accordance with existing law. It took a Federal judge to clarify that law, but that’s done now. The school board is not the correct body to advocate for changes in the law. Besides the obvious conflict of interest, much time and effort has been wasted on what is really a comparatively small matter. The school board should turn their attention to more pressing matters with a direct impact on many more students.

The Atheist community should also support the school board in their mission by bringing this matter to a dignified and swift conclusion. We do ourselves no favors by rabble rousing and distracting a government agency from their core mission.

Some members of the community are looking for a fairly substantial change in the law. I suspect that what they want would require a constitutional amendment at the federal level. If this is important to them, I honestly encourage them to pursue that route. Democracy works best when all options are on the table, debate is open and honest, and all perspectives are represented.

The community should take on that task. Let’s hear them state their proposal clearly. Then we can find out what the majority actually has to say about their supposed majority religion and it’s supposedly wonderful effects on government. That’s a bet I’m ready to take.

This week, a Federal judge issued a judgement that the banner must come down immediately. The full text of the judge’s decision is a clear, lucid, and highly readable summary both of what happened and what the law says about all parts of it. It’s a good read, and I highly recommend it.

The touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the First Amendment
mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between
religion and nonreligion. When the government acts with the ostensible and
predominant purpose of advancing religion, it violates that central Establishment
Clause value of official religious neutrality, there being no neutrality when the
government’s ostensible object is to take sides.

Or, if that’s too long, he says it again later on: The Government must not appear to take sides on issues of religious beliefs.

He notes that public schools are held to a higher standard because kids are impressionable, and wraps up. As I mentioned back in April, this is a simple case.

Between the lines, the judge is pretty clear that Cranston shot itself in the foot with all the bible thumping and yelling that took place at the hearings. “The Court concludes that Cranston’s purposes in installing and, more recently, voting to retain the Prayer Mural are not clearly secular”. He’s being polite. People at the school board meeting professed their own Christian faith, screamed at Jessica, called her a witch, and told her to go to hell. The school board members themselves felt compelled to make declarations of personal faith prior to casting their votes. If the townspeople had come out and calmly said, “it’s a historical artifact, religion has nothing to do with this,” it would have been a slightly harder sell. As it is, the town revealed its religious purpose in the banner, and thus were forced to take it down.

Or, as the kids say: P0wned.

I got to meet Jessica back in June, shortly after the kerfuffle started. I’m an occasional contributor to Freethought RI, an atheist radio show. I happened to be in the studio when she stopped by to share her thoughts on the air. She’s a well spoken and charming person who seemed honestly surprised that this has become such a big deal.

At the time, I recall that I downplayed the situation to her. I remember encouraging her to not get too hung up on it. Jessica is completely in the right on this one, which is rare in life. When you’re absolutely, completely correct, my opinion is that you should go ahead and run with it. In the grand sweep of things the prayer banner is a small matter. Any actual injuries the banner’s presence caused her are incredibly slight. There are much larger fish to fry, even in the ongoing squabble between theists and non.

Unfortunately, my analysis missed something. I’ve lived in the North, in big University towns for a long time. I live in a safe little bubble where even the guy who works the cash register at the gas station probably has a college degree and some mature thoughts on current social affairs. I had forgotten what I learned growing up in the South: There are some incredibly violent knuckle draggers out there. People exist, right here in America, who will actually, literally take you in the woods and beat you to death for crimes like failing to be Christian enough, being gay, dressing the wrong way, loving the wrong person, being the wrong color, and so on.

Jessica lifted a rock and exposed a nest of those sorts of people in Cranston. She’s endured some truly vile treatment, in person and online. The comment stream on the Providence Journal articles covering the story are an open sewer of bigotry. One blogger has captured a few dozen of the juiciest pieces of online asshattery. It’s nauseating. The police are investigating the online threats that she’s been receiving, and so on.

So while I still think that Jessica should wrap this up and turn her considerable talents to more important things – I was wrong to downplay the banner. Perhaps I’m wrong to think of prejudice against non-christians in America as a solved and trivial problem. Turns out that when you go after one of their symbols, theres still a decent slice of that community who get spitting mad. Of course, they’re not running campaigns of punitive rape or using child soldiers to raze villages. What we have in Cranston are first world problems, but they are serious problems nonetheless.

The silver lining is that when the world at large looks at the situation, it seems to come down squarely on Jessica’s side. Reddit held an “Ask me Anything” for Jessica and it’s really smart. Beyond Cranston and Providence, in the broader world, commentators are incredibly supportive. That night in June on the radio show we received a record number of calls from all over the country – every single one of them expressing support.

Unless we can talk openly and honestly about things, we’ll never change any minds. It’s hard to get the bigots out in the open. They’ve learned to keep to themselves as the culture matures. You draw a lot of heat and fire when you pull them from their holes. Hopefully at least one of the violent idiots Jessica exposed will look around at some point and see that the world is laughing at them.

Changing minds would be the real victory. The banner itself is small change.

Also posted on my personal blog.

With a tree paid for by our taxes and placed on Public property, Governor Chafee had a good idea to try and make this government sponsored celebration a little more open to the people of his state who are not Christian. His evocation of Roger Williams’s desire for full religious tolerance is as patriotic and modest a request as a man can ask. In reaching out a hand to his fellow Rhode Islanders who are not of the same faith as him he seeks to bring the promise of a secular government back into view.

This was not his mistake.

As we have seen around the country for the last several years holiday displays have become very controversial. From the FFRF’s signs in Wisconsin, Washington and Illinois to a “Knowledge Tree” in Pennsylvania and Washington, non-believer groups have been getting their message added to the seasonal displays due to the legal requirements that a government not discriminate on matters of religion. This has led municipalities to make the stark choice: include everything or nothing at all.

This was also not Governor Chafee’s mistake.

The Governor was trying to make inclusive something that was exclusive.  He was attempting to apply an open, tolerant and peaceful desire to a closed and insular symbol. Forget the changing nature of the history of the Christmas tree itself, it has a current meaning to many people as a Christian symbol of a central Christian doctrinal celebration. And as much as the songs and homilies speak of “Peace on Earth” and “Good Will Toward Men” many Christians expect peace as the result of Christian domination of the world. The words are kind, but the history of deeds is more telling, and that history is of a closed and tightly controlled doctrine.

And as ignorant as the critics sound when they asked if a Menorah would become a “Holiday Candle Set”, they might actually have a good point. Is it OK to re-purpose a cultures symbols for new uses? Lincoln Chafee, as a Catholic, is reworking his own symbols, but as a governor his “secular culture” is doing the co-opting. Is it unreasonable to expect Christians to not see that as slight against their religion?

Sure, sure, sure… I know that many (if not most) Christian symbolism is itself lifted from some other source, most notably European paganism, but does this mean it’s OK to steal it from them?

Well, symbols are symbols, not property or person. They have no feelings nor desires. Akin to art, they mean what you want them to mean.  And like art they evoke emotion. That may, in fact, be their only purpose and what you do to a symbol will, without fail, evoke even more emotion. Not all of it positive. I suppose it all depends on the result you were going for.

The outpouring of emotion of the last week has been anything but inclusive. Fueled by sensational news stories and one-sided radio hosts people have attacked the Governor. They see him as trying to take Christ out of Christmas and as bowing down to the forces of “political correctness”. They were angry that his was trying to make the celebration of Christmas match its story.

That was the Governor’s mistake.

(via Friendly Atheist, via LOL God)

In case you’re not sure which argument I’m referring to, I will define Pascal’s Wager here.

Even without evidence a rational person should still wager as though God exists since one has everything to gain and nothing to lose.  The “payout” of the belief wager breaks down like this:

• God exists
• If true: reward (eternal life)
• If false: no penalty
• Non-belief
• If true: no penalty
• If false: penalty (hell)

As you can see from this simple breakdown, one would be making a safe bet, were this kind of wager even possible.  Yet this argument is flawed in many ways, both as Pascal formulated it and how it is general used.

Lottery, not “even money”

While Blaise Pascal formulated this as a way to live ones life, it’s general use it based on simple belief. If one believes, on will be rewarded.  But we know this is too simple a wager.

There is no known religion on earth that requires mere belief of it’s adherents. There are quite literally 10s of thousands of Christian denominations, sects, and cults.  All of them exist apart from each other despite all of their members believing in the same God and yet they all require something different.  This is the same an there being 10s of thousands of different Gods, each one a new chance at heaven (and hell).

Now add the 2 other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, each with many denominations, sects, and cults.  Now the lottery has expanded to 100s of thousands of chances to get it right (or wrong).  And this is all in regards to the same God! Hindu, ancestor worship and animism add thousands upon thousands more. If we add the over 1 million other gods we know of from recorded history, we are now rivaling the odds presented by your standard multi-million dollar national lottery.  Hundreds of millions to 1 odds.  Good luck.

The Safest Bet

Possibly the best betting strategy to use in that sort of lottery is to simply avoid the worst possible penalty.  Essentially you need to determine the worst hell available from all the choices and then believe in that god.  This strategy allows you to automatically avoid the worst possible penalty.  Any other hell is objectively better than your god’s hell.

Considering that no one seems to use this argument for belief in a particular god, it is the clearest indication that Pascal’s wager is merely a rhetorical tactic and not an actual motivation for belief.

Manipulation Through Fear

Pascal’s wager is generally a last line of defense for an arguing theist.  If they have been unable to convince someone with what they consider evidence they will resort to emotional arguments and what amount to intimidation. Expecting someone to agree with your positions because if they don’t they will suffer is not a reasonable argument, it’s extortion.  Now, I will grant that the theist in this case is not the one actually making the direct threat, but they are the one passing it along.  They are letting you know the consequences of not doing what “the boss” wants you to do.  This is the way it seems to be most often used.

The Best Wager: A Moral Alternative

I recently encountered what I consider the best response to Pascal’s Wager.  It turns the tables on the theist using it and forces them to consider not only the wager, but also the motives of their God.  It’s called the Atheist’s Wager.

Consider living your life dedicated to helping others and reducing the amount suffering in the world.  Do this without any belief in or regard for the existence of a god.

If you are correct you lose nothing, but have greatly helped those around you and will be remembered fondly.

If you are wrong, a benevolent god will judge you on the merits of your life and reward you for it.  In fact he may be more inclined to reward you since you lived your good life without expecting one.

This makes much more sense, since it really reducing the options down to 2: non-belief or belief.

And should a theist counter that God requires belief, the response is simple: Then he can no longer be describes with words like “benevolent” and “just”.  The God being discussed can now only be described with words like “vain” and “cruel”.  Even if God required both a good life and belief he will still choose to punish a good person for his own vanity.

Tibetan culture is strongly religious. In every city I visited, many (perhaps most) people started and ended the day with a walk (always in the clockwise direction) around the local monastery or temple. This circumambulation is known as a “kora.” Admittedly, this is a cultural as well as a religious practice. If your whole town turns out for an evening walk, perhaps you do as well. In addition, the temples were filled with people every day we were there. They left small money on the altars, lit the candles, said their devotions, and interacted with the monks. This daily practice absolutely dwarfs what I’ve seen anywhere in America. Prayer flags absolutely littered the hills and mountains. Most people seem to make pilgrimages to sacred sites on a regular basis. I saw dozens of people doing prostrations all the way around major religious sites.

Religion is important to the Tibetans on a daily and hourly basis in a way that I’ve never seen in America.

In fact, I’ve never seen anything even close in America, even comparing high holidays. I was in Tibet during Saga Dawa, a monthlong celebration of the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. The best comparison might with the month of December – the whole of Christmastime. The time of the year when God fever strikes most strongly. Even at Christmas, how many people do you know who will make a pilgrimage to a holy site? How many Americans go and visit their brother, the monk, in the local monastery? Do you know even one American who has performed even one public prostration (or a similar physical act of faith), much less knelt their slow and bruising way around a temple?

How many people in America actually live their supposed religion day by day instead of mouthing the words as hollow rhetoric?

Anyone seeking elective office has to mention their “faith in God,” almost as frequently as they affirm their “support for the troops.” However, in day to day life, neither is terribly prevalent. When you watch how people act, the truth comes out. Actual religious practitioners in the US are few and far between.

Atheists should keep this in mind when we argue our points. In practice, America is already an atheist nation. We are merely cleaning up the gap between hollow doublespeak and common practice.

Here’s a backstory for you. I’m a regular contributor to Yahoo! Answers under my usual cyber-pseudonym. I had answered a question citing examples of poor “design” of a supposedly omnipotent god/’designer’ as one of my answers. Not too long after, I received a message from a user who goes by the name Kissthepilot. Since replying to that first one, I have received quite a few more, as I guess he’s wanting to bait me into a debate with him. Here is the description in his bio:

I’m a young earth creation believer who has done so much research on evolution that I cannot believe anyone still follows that stuff anymore. I am a real christian, and I love debating with atheists. I just wish they would follow their own logic!

I know what you’re thinking. Headache waiting to happen. Believe me, I still think it, but in terms of my wrists, because right now I have a lot of typing to do. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and provide a little insight if you can.

Now, I’m not a scientist, I just play one on the radio. I’m not going to claim to be one, either. I don’t exactly have the debating skills or articulation of people like Matt Dillahunty or Richard Dawkins, but I’d like to consider myself at least well-learned enough in basic scientific concepts and logic that I can counter pretty much anything a YEC like Kissthepilot could throw at me.

Yes, Kissthepilot is notified about this blog post, as sending messages is only a 1500 character limit with Yahoo!. I have a little more wiggle room on my own blog, and by wiggle room I mean all the space I want to address everything that needs addressing.

…which is everything. So here we go.

Intelligent Design is a search for design in nature, and I believe it has good evidence of a designer. Since it’s science, it says nothing about who the designer is.

Here’s where the siren went off, right off the bat. Other than the fact that Intelligent Design isn’t science; heck, it doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis. The whole thing is one gigantic argumentum ad ignorantium, but more on that later.

Design in nature is easily found; heck, if you cut down a tree and look at the rings, there’s a pretty circular design. Organs in our body are “designed” to perform certain functions. I get it. However, this is because evolution is the designer. There are plenty of instances in nature where such design is inefficient; for example, the holes in my throat that lead to my respiratory system and digestive system are aligned in such a way that choking on food is a risk for me.

I’ve heard YEC’s and other creationists cite the design of the eye as a great example of Intelligent Design (ID) or God’s handiwork. In other species, this is not the case. We have a blind spot in our eyes that is caused by where the bunching of optic nerves enter the retina. Squids do not have this.

But here’s what Kissthepilot (Ktp) has to say.

Also, all of the examples I’ve been shown of apparently poor design in nature are explainable as actually good design. For example, the mammalian eye. People say the blood vessels are on the wrong side, and the octopus has a better design. Well, how well to octopusses see? When we say someone can see well, we dont’ call them octopuss eyed. We call them eagle eyed. Eagles have the same design that humans and other mammals do.

First, I want you all to spot the first rationalization, and I’m going to tell you why it backfires. Ktp has managed to try to explain examples of ostensibly bad design as good design, by referencing the eagle. Yes, Ktp, when someone can see well, we do call them eagle-eyed. Do you know why? It’s because an eagle has such ocular acuity, it can identify a rabbit moving at a mile away. An eagle’s eyesight is four times better than a human’s. Now, you would agree that this is good design, but I’m not an eagle. I’m a human. Why wasn’t my eye designed to have the same acuity as an eagle’s? I’ll tell you why. Because I don’t need eyes like an eagle. My environment has dictated that my eyesight should have a certain range, focus, and clarity. In my case, I’m worse off than others because I actually have to wear glasses to correct my vision. That’s not design, that’s a natural flaw.

Here is the heart of the argument with ID.

We can see design in nature. If something is designed wrong, in your opinion, why a designer would do that is an interesting question but has nothing to do with if there was a designer.

I’ll agree with the fact that we can see design in nature. Ktp forgets, however, that design is a subjective term; what one certain biologist might consider a thing of beauty, like squids and other cephalopods, I consider to be ugly. (Sorry, PZ… nothing against you.) What YECs like Ktp might consider to be good design, like eagle eyes, is quite frankly a missed opportunity in other species. Imagine the strides we could have made if our vision was like that bird of prey!

Moving on, Ktp dishes out the second standard Creationist boilerplate fallback:

Evolution is not a fact. Unless you are talking about microevolution, which nobody disputes. Saying micro proves macro is a bait and switch scheme. I’m too smart to be fooled by that kind of logic.

Evolution is a fact. It’s scientifically testable and observable; modern biology and many other sciences (like the medical branch) are based heavily off of evolution.

Micro does prove macroevolution. Parsing these two terms out of evolution is an invention by creationists to rationalize away speciation, which they say cannot be observed. The only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is time. Ktp, perhaps you have outsmarted yourself.

After this point, I attempted to reason with Ktp by calling out the Discovery Institute and other “creation scientists” as liars. Ktp countered with what looks to be a plea for me to evaluate “both sides” of the argument.

But that’s the problem here. There isn’t two sides to this. Evolution/creation isn’t a controversy; hell, it’s not even a battle. Evolution is science. ID/Creationism is not. I would have thought that Kitzmiller v. Dover was the final nail in the coffin, but it seems I was wrong.

If you want to find out what ID is really about, I could suggest some reading. So far, nobody who believes like you do has agreed to take up my challenge. I’ll even read a book by Dawkins or whoever you want at the same time.

The only reading that Ktp could suggest is by representatives of the Discovery Institute; after all, they coined the term! So no, Ktp. I’m not going to take up your “challenge”, and for good reason. I want you to read whatever books you want, Ktp, but only because you are truly interested in learning the material and forming objective conclusions based on their content. I’m only going to suggest that you read books by real scientists and biologists, such as Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne, and The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins. Both lay out an excellent case for evolutionary theory as opposed to what “creation scientists” say.

In case anyone missed it, I’ve been granting that I can very easily spot instances of design in nature. However, it came with a caveat; I also recognize that “design” is a subjective term. It should not be interspersed with “purpose”. Vestigial organs are a case in point of this. Clearly, they once were designed for some use, but no longer have any purpose.

ID is the scientific search for design in nature. It uses the same methods that many sciences use to detect design, sciences you would not object to. However, if we turn that science down to look at biological things, you cry foul and say it’s not science. Why?

Ktp, I have said no such thing. I’m not an “evolutionist”, nor am I a scientist, as I stated earlier. If you want us to have a debate, the first thing you need to learn is to not put words in my mouth and build strawmen.

The major problem with ID is what Ktp stated: the “search for design”. This implies the presupposition that nature was designed. Science says life on earth was “designed” through evolution. ID says life on earth was “designed” through… what, exactly?

According to the Discovery Institute, ID “agnostic regarding the source of design”. Right. So what is it? If anyone kept up with Kitzmiller v. Dover like I did, this has statement been exposed as an egregious lie.

This doesn’t sway Ktp, though.

Some examples of similar science are forensics, random number generation, cryptology, reverse engineering, and SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

None of these examples are at all the same “scientific search” as ID, Ktp. As a programmer, I can tell you all about random number engineering, but I won’t get into it. Mathematics has nothing to do with subjective opinion. Forensics relies on evaluating microscopic evidence. Cryptology is mathematics- and logic-based, a far cry from what ID can hope to achieve. I need not go on.

If you have never heard any of these arguments, you don’t know what ID and the discovery institute is all about. So, are you willing to learn, or are you going to refuse like most of the people I ask?

So far, Ktp, you haven’t really taught me anything. I have heard all of these arguments, and so have many others before me who have refuted it not just online, but in a court of law. We’ll have one of those people, Joshua Rosenau, on the show next week, if you want to tune in.

The remainder of your messages, Ktp, was yet another passive-aggressive assault on my credibility, which I think I have addressed here. But one final thing you said:

One question, what if I told you I only got my information about evolution from answers in genesis? Would you believe I had a balanced view? What’s the difference between me saying that, and you only getting yours from talkorigins and Dr Dawkins?

No. I don’t think you have a balanced view at all, despite you having repeatedly claimed that you look at both sides. There’s only one side to this debate, and it’s the one based in scientific fact. I’m sticking to that side, because it’s the side that talkorigins.org and Professor Dawkins are on. However, I understand the motive behind your argument. TalkOrigins and Dawkins are not my final authorities; they are resources. I cite them because they have objective, verifiable, and empirical information that I can verify on my own.

I hate to say it, but the same cannot be said of anyone in the “creation science” camp. “Creation science” is an oxymoron, because creation isn’t science. It’s a presuppositionalist religious assertion.

A comic I once read defined the difference between Creationism and science, and it went like this:

• Creationism: Here’s the conclusion. *holds up Bible* What evidence can we find that supports it?
• Science: Here’s the evidence. *displays some natural phenomenon, item, etc.* What conclusions should we draw from it?

If you can’t see why the first part doesn’t work, then I think our discussion should end here.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against the city of Cranston, asking them to take down a banner in the auditorium that shows the “school prayer.” The banner has hung there, across from the school motto, since the 60′s. The school (like others across the country) used to have a recitation of the school prayer or the Lord’s prayer each morning. That practice stopped, eventually, and at this point the banner is a sort of relic. Last June, people started making requests that it be taken down from its prominent place in the auditorium. The argument is straightforward – a public school has no business with “prayer,” one way or another. The matter made its way to the school board in March of 2011. After a public hearing, the school board decided to *not* remove the banner, and now we have a lawsuit to force them to do it.

So far, so good. Oddly, one of the most sensible comments on this issue came from the generally hard-line Bishop Tobin:

“Surely no one’s preventing that free exercise of religion … The rise and fall of religious faith, Christian or otherwise, in our nation, or even in Cranston, doesn’t depend on the fate of the banner. If it has to be removed, so be it. Faith will survive and the free practice of religion will go on.”

There’s a deeper issue here though and it shows in the public reaction to the lawsuit.

Reading the comments on the news article above reminded me of why I never read the comments on news articles. The unfiltered internet is a horrifying thing to behold. So filled with rage and hatred. When you combine anonymity and a large audience, the conversation tends to drop off a cliff. There are gems of sense in there, but also some glimpses into a cloistered bigotry that I like to imagine as a distant echo from a bygone age. The most horrifying comments are the ones who jump straight to an incredibly lowbrow sexism. They try to intimidate the plaintiff and anyone else who disagrees with them because (in their words) she’s just some dumb girl.

The primary plaintiff is Jessica Ahlquist, a sophomore at the school. She is a brave young woman who has become the face of the lawsuit. I cannot imagine that level of scrutiny myself, and I’m a self confident and successful person in my 30′s. To be under the halogen lights in one’s teens, already an insecure and formative time, would be an incredible amount of pressure. I respect her courage. She had to be removed from some of her classes because other students are threatening to harm her. From the tone of the comments on the Providence Journal (and on this website), those students are not alone in their violent urges. There seems to be a substantial contingent of people online who would prefer that women act in a docile skirt-wearing god-fearing sort of way.

So here’s my point in writing all of this: I was going to stay quiet about the banner. I have faith that the legal system will churn through and come to the correct answer. However, when people start to publicly intimidate, shout down, and threaten a high school sophomore for having the nerve to speak up, the game changes. When they bring their intolerant hatred out in public and pretend that it’s a virtue – at that point I feel a civic and moral duty to push back.

I’ve written and spoken before about the fact that we should deal with larger social issues of religion first. Some examples that matter are the sheltering of pedophiles in positions of authority, the misguided attacks on scientific progress and public health, the institutional sexism and homophobia, the tax evasion and fraud, and the wars. If we could get to the point where this banner was really just a historical relic – I would be willing to declare victory and go home.

To me, the banner itself is a small deal in the larger world. Yes, it should come down. It should probably have come down decades ago. This should have been an administrative thing. The real problem is that when someone finally raised the point we saw the underbelly of intolerance that still exists in the country. That intolerance is worth fighting.

This is a big deal.  All the ACLU had originally asked was that the banner be removed, per the law.  When the school council refused, they decided to take on a potential lawsuit.  This is that lawsuit.

This should be a clear case to anyone.  It doesn’t matter that the prayer banner was a gift from s student or that it was there for 50+ years. What matters is that the moment a student or even a citizen of Cranston saw a problem with it, it was in violation.  It was in violation before, but if no one complained, nothing could be done.

This is now a government school that is endorsing a prayer, which is has no business doing.  The 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes it very clear that it would not get into the business of church.  Endorsing a prayer is a church function.  To take a legal stand in favor ofthis banner endorses it’s religion.

In addition to that, the Cranston school board has added various other objects around the banner in an attempt to shoehorn itself into legality.  It’s should be clear that this isn’t an attempt to comply with the law, but to obscure the fact that they want a religious banner to remain.  It’s immoral and it devalues any of the work that students contribute as mere window dressing.

The Rhode Island Atheist Society fully agrees with the intent of this lawsuit.  The payer banner has no place in a government building and the Cranston school board has no legal standing.