The religious poster victory was another effort by Vegas, in his school board capacity, to shove his religion into the faces of teachers, students and administrators of the school district.
A California public school board member who is also an evangelical pastor is apparently bent on injecting the schools with his brand of religion – an unfortunate mishmash of Religious Right canards and fundamentalism.
Chad Vegas, pastor at an evangelical church, the Sovereign Church of Bakersfield, and member of the school board of the 36,000-student Kern High School District, sounded a triumphant note to The Los Angeles Times recently after the district adopted a policy of festooning its classrooms and offices with an “In God We Trust” poster.
“We’re not going to accept the agenda of some radical leftists who want to expunge God from public dialogue,” Vegas said after the Kern school board voted 4-1 in favor of the “In God We Trust” policy. “Instead, we’re teaching our citizens – including our children – that the very foundation of government is that God gave them unalienable rights that cannot be usurped by the will of the majority or anyone else.”
The religious poster victory was another effort by Vegas, in his school board capacity, to shove his religion into the faces of teachers, students and administrators of the school district. And members of the community and media who are taking notice should probably not be terribly surprised. The Bakersfield Californian reported that when Vegas campaigned for a seat on the board in 2004, half of his contributors were from his church. Part of the church’s mission, according to its Web site, is to help people to “catch a glimpse of the vision of the Glory of Christ so that you might delight in Him, develop in your understanding of Him, and declare Him in all things to all peoples.”
Trying to encourage people to see Christ is something Vegas takes seriously and in this nation has the freedom to do so robustly. But it is troubling that he’s also taking advantage of his seat on the Kern school board to plump for his religious beliefs. He’s using that position to great effect, so far.
And Vegas in a blog that can be accessed via his church’s Web site, called “The Foolish Preacher,” meanders on about his school board work and solicits input. The Bakersfield newspaper reported that in early October, the pastor posted and item asking his readers what they think about his proposal to adorn the Kern schools with “In God We Trust” posters.
Last fall he successfully steered through the board a measure that required calendars used in all the districts’ schools refer to winter recess as “Christmas recess” and “spring recess” as Easter recess. After that policy was adopted, Vegas again crowed to the media that he wasn’t buying “the secular atheist agenda that we should expunge all religious dialogue from the public forum.”
And in 2005, Vegas unsuccessfully tried to force the neo-creationist “intelligent design” package to be taught in all the high schools’ biology classes. After his God-poster victory in November, Vegas told a reporter with The Los Angeles Times that he still thought evolution is “nonsense” and that he remained open to another push for “intelligent design.”
The only board member to vote against plastering Kern schools’ walls with the “In God We Trust” poster was its president Bob Hampton, who told his colleagues that “the spiritual side of the student belongs in the home and in the church – not in the school.”
Was it a subtle suggestion to Vegas as well?
No doubt Kern students would be better off if pastor Vegas would cease using his perch on the school board to push a Religious Right agenda.
© 1947 - 2009