Moment of Silence – Blue Cereal Education

“In God We Trust” (Or Else)

Blue Cereal — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 11:51:56 +0000

There are certainly plenty of wonderful individual people of faith around, including many Christians.

I feel obligated to open with this acknowledgement (disclaimer?) because my next several posts are going to focus on clashes between religious folks and public education which have been in the news recently, and it seems like every time you come across a story about someone asserting their Christian beliefs via legislation or the courts, they’re doing it for one of three reasons: (1) they want more government money for something without having to follow the same rules as everyone else, (2) they want the government to like their religion best and tell everyone about it more often because that’s “freedom of religion,” or (3) they want to be horrible to some group of people everyone else is supposed to be kind to.

A Moment of Silence: Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)

Blue Cereal — Mon, 04 May 2020 15:34:34 +0000

Is It Constitutional Now? How About Now? Or Now? Three Big Things: 1. After it became clear that state-sponsored prayer was no longer a realistic option in public education, states began experimenting with the idea of a “moment of silence” during which students could pray (although no one had ever suggested that they couldn’t). 2. … Continue reading

Moment of Silence – Bown v. Gwinnett County School District (1997) / Brown v. Gilmore (2001)

Blue Cereal — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 16:38:11 +0000

Two cases in the early 1960s largely eliminated state-sponsored prayer from public schooling. Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963) are to this day touted by the far right as responsible for having kicked God out of schools – leading inevitably to sex, drugs, violence, rock’n’roll, corduroy, divorce, the pill, AIDS, the Clintons, terrorism, and a Kenyan sleeper-cell Mooslim illegitimately seizing the White House for eight long, painful years. The solution, of course, is to get God back IN our schools by requiring regimented recitation of state-approved chants. He LOVES those! Do this, we are assured, and America’s problems will vanish faster than you can say “civil liberties!”

A Wall of Separation – Bown v. Gwinnett County School District (1997)

Blue Cereal — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 19:46:11 +0000

A Wall of Separation – Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)

Blue Cereal — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 22:50:48 +0000

So far we’ve done a brief overview of the concept of a ‘Wall of Separation’ between church and state, and covered a few early Supreme Court Cases involving religion and public schools. We looked at Everson v. Board of Education (1947) in which the Court determined it was perfectly acceptable for the state to reimburse … Continue reading