Perkins tells two stories in the essay. One deals with a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in
According to Perkins, the ACLU believes “Christians who pray at those events deserve to be thrown into jail.” This is a gross distortion of the facts. Attendees at a school board meeting can pray all they want before, during or after the meeting. Individual prayer, freely chosen and done in a non-disruptive manner, is protected.
That’s a far cry from an official, state-sponsored prayer that takes places before a government meeting. Prayers like that involve the government intimately in religious matters. A municipal official must line up clergy to pray, schedule them and perhaps even make decisions about the content of the invocation. The Supreme Court has held that a government practice violates separation of church and state if it fosters “excessive entanglement” between church and state. This one does.
Of course, no one has said anything about imprisoning people for praying. A federal court has already ruled Tangipahoa Parish’s prayer practice unconstitutional. If government leaders there defy that ruling, they could be held in contempt of court. If they go that extreme route, they might be punished for defying a court order, but not for praying.
Finally, it is worth noting that when it comes to church-state separation, Tangipahoa Parish is a repeat offender. Over the years, the parish’s public school system has been sued for sponsoring prayer at school events, encouraging the distribution of Bibles in class and undermining evolution with disclaimers in textbooks. These religious activities have reflected fundamentalist forms of Christianity, and some people are fed up. A Roman Catholic parent was among the plaintiffs when school prayer was challenged.
Given the parish’s abysmal track record, church-state separationists have every reason to be extra-diligent.
Perkins’ second story deals with a 16-year-old girl in
Here are the facts: The incident was the girl’s twelfth run-in with the law, including several incidents this summer. After this most recent occurrence, an exasperated judge noted that the girl has not done well at home, where adult supervision is lax, and ordered her held until trial.
The contents of the flier have not been divulged, but one local paper described it as depicting two boys kissing and said the material was “inflammatory.” Some bloggers in the area have charged that the girl was using the fliers to harass a fellow student. If the images used were of students at the school and the language was perceived as threatening, the flier could violate laws against making threats or inciting others to engage in violence.
In any case, a judge’s decision to keep a teenager under confinement after a dozen run-ins with the law hardly sounds draconian. To a lot of people, including “law-and-order” conservatives, it sounds like common sense.
Perkins writes, “[I]f they’ll arrest a young girl for poor judgment, how long will it be before they come after your pastor for reading Scripture that opposes homosexual behavior?”
There’s an easy to answer to that: Even if your pastor happens to be an aspiring felon with a rap sheet as long as his arm, he has nothing to fear from engaging in mere speech. The First Amendment protects his right to sermonize against gays. He does not have the right to threaten people with bodily harm.
It’s a shame Perkins has to resort to distortion to keep his troops whipped up in state of hysteria. It’s a sign that at the core of his claims, something rotten lurks.
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