Speaking of banned books, here we have a tale of a lawsuit against a school district in which the plaintiff claims that the vice principal of a Maryland middle school told her to stop reading a particular book or face punishment.
The book? What else?
A vice principal at Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School in Laurel last month ordered Amber, then 12, to stop reading the Bible or face punishment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday by Amber’s mother. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, alleges that the vice principal’s actions violated the girl’s civil rights.
“Amber’s a new Christian, and she’s trying to learn all she can,” said Maryann Mangum, the girl’s mother. “She reads her Bible and she goes to Sunday school. . . . It really upset me when she was not allowed to read it on her own time.”
John White, a spokesman for the school system, said administrators learned of the lawsuit Friday and were not prepared to comment on its claims. “We’re just beginning to look into it,” he said.
Mangum said her daughter was reading her Bible on Sept. 14 when Vice Principal Jeanetta Rainey approached. According to Mangum and the lawsuit, Rainey told Amber that reading the Bible violated school policy and that she would face discipline if she continued to do so.
Later that day, Amber recounted the episode to Mangum, who is her adoptive mother and also her biological grandmother. James Baker, a family friend, sent a note to the school asking that the principal identify any policy barring students from reading the Bible during their free time.
Yeah, I smell a rat. This has all the hallmarks of one of those “oppressed Christian” lawsuits that turn out to be based on less than nothing. Remember that case in California where a teacher claimed he was disciplined for simply teaching the Declaration of Independence? Not quite.
Something else is going on in this case. Maryland’s not exactly a hotbed of antichristian sentiment. This kid’s a “new Christian,” which makes me think she’s in the zealous-convert stage. Was she really just sitting quietly reading the Bible to herself, or was she proselytizing, reading aloud, annoying other students?
You know what else makes me suspicious about this?
The principal, Charoscar Coleman, did not respond, the lawsuit says. A friend at Mangum’s church suggested that Mangum contact the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit legal organization specializing in cases that involve issues of religious and civil liberties.
The institute’s president, John W. Whitehead, said yesterday that the law is clear and that Amber’s rights were violated. He said the lawsuit does not specifically seek monetary damages but rather that a judge declare that students cannot be barred from reading the Bible during free time at school.
“This is a seventh-grader who’s probably overwhelmed by what’s going on around her,” Whitehead said. “This is a chance for her to get some comfort during the day. . . . What would you rather have a kid doing, throwing spit wads or sitting there silently reading a few passages from the Bible?”
Though you’d never know it from the Washington Post’s completely uncritical coverage, the Rutherford Institute has gone to great lengths to disguise its agenda over the past decade or so:
John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, has gone to great lengths to conceal the ideological leanings of his Christian Right legal center in statements to the mass media. He told the New York Times that “Oh, gosh, no,” he had no political agenda in representing Paula Jones, and that he had founded the Rutherford Institute by himself. The New York Times reporter described The Rutherford Institute as “a kind of evangelical Christian civil liberties union.”118
Whitehead’s claims misrepresent the group. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is blunt, “Our files on the Institute go back 10 years. After examining the material, we can safely say Whitehead is not being honest in his description of his organization.”119
From its founding, the Rutherford Institute has pursued a highly-politicized ultra-conservative agenda. A review of Rutherford Institute newsletters, reports, and direct mail appeals going back seven years shows a long pattern of attacks on liberals in government and President Clinton in particular. Whitehead consistently puts forward an apocalyptic conspiracist vision of devout Christian activists under concerted attack by corrupt and repressive government officials in the service of godless and immoral secular humanism.
This fits right in with his vision, doesn’t it? And a little more about that vision:
The man who launched Whitehead’s career is the 80-year-old Rousas John Rushdoony, perhaps the leading theocratic Christian thinker of the 20th Century. Rushdoony heads the secretive Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, Calif., and is the founder of what is called the Christian Reconstructionist movement. “Reconstructionism” asserts that in order to pave the way for the “Kingdom of God,” the world must develop theocratic republics ruled by “Biblical law.”
Rushdoony’s magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, was published in 1973. It opposes democracy and argues that the Ten Commandments and the Biblical stories of their adjudication in Old Testament Israel provide the only legitimate legal blueprint for society.
Although few adhere fully to Rushdoony’s view, such prominent conservatives as Howard Phillips and Robert Billings credit Rushdoony’s work as the intellectual catalyst for the Christian Right. Billings, a founder of the Moral Majority, once said, “if it weren’t for [Rushdoony’s] books, none of us would be here.” [See David Cantor’s The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism.]
The man whose books launched the Christian Right also inspired and guided the career of John Whitehead. Rushdoony supplied the outline for Whitehead’s first book, The Separation Illusion, which the young attorney researched in his mentor’s library. Published in 1977 — with an introduction by Rushdoony — Whitehead’s book attacks the constitutional doctrine of the separation of church and state.
The book advocates the reorganization of the United States as a “Christian Nation” under the rationale that “the Christians are a spiritual race chosen to serve as the sons of God.” But Whitehead envisions something worse than second-class citizenship for what he calls “the other spiritual race.” He warns ominously that “doom happens to be their lot.”
Whitehead invokes the intolerant Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the natural role models for this new government. “The Calvinist doctrine of predestination separates mankind into those who are damned and those who are saved,” Whitehead wrote in The Separation Illusion. “The elect of God,” Whitehead continued, “partake of divine favor while the non-elect are cursed.”
The U.S. Constitution’s recognition that all religious faiths are equal under the law is anathema to Whitehead. In his book, he argues that the doctrine of separation of church and state causes “the true God” to be an “outcast” and a “criminal.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Whitehead insists, than the notion that everyone is “equal in the eyes of God.” Whitehead declares: “To hold that the Christian religion is no better than Buddhism or Judaism is blasphemy.”
Following this line of thought, Whitehead disdains religious pluralism as explicitly anti-Christian. He argues that “the atheists, the American Jewish Committee and the Synagogue Council of America” colluded to “eradicate” state-sponsored prayer in public schools.
Their motive? The “sons of darkness believed that cutting the reciting of prayer from school would aid in their gaining control of the system,” Whitehead wrote. “The public schools are satanic imitations of the true God’s institutional church.” He asserts that when the U.S. Supreme Court decides cases on the basis of religious equality, it “merely assaults the one faith.”
In his book, Whitehead views this conflict between Christian theocrats and civil libertarians in apocalyptic terms. “The Christians serve God and the non-Christians serve the leader of the ungodly, Satan. Conflict results. It’s total spiritual warfare, and it is being fought every second of every day.”
Whitehead sees this war as going badly. “At one time Christians had command of the United States,” he wrote. But “through toleration they receded until the non-Christians grew too strong to combat any longer.” Ambiguously, Whitehead adds that this struggle is “an arena of both spiritual and physical warfare.”
. . .
In 1982, five years after publication of The Separation Illusion, Whitehead founded the Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Va. The Institute, essentially a legal project of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation, was named after the 17th Century Scottish revolutionary Samuel Rutherford, who called for adherence to God’s laws over those of the King of England. Rushdoony was a member of the Rutherford Institute’s small founding board.
At a Reconstructionist conference in 1983, Rushdoony spoke of “our plans, through Rutherford … to fight the battle against statism and the freedom of Christ’s Kingdom.” He introduced Whitehead as a man “chosen by God” for this work.
In recent years, Whitehead has put some distance between the Rutherford Institute and some of these Christian Reconstructionist beliefs, but don’t think that they don’t still want to make this a Christian nation. And they sure do like to claim that they’re being persecuted despite being in the overwhelming majority.
Oh, and remember that bill the House just passed that would strip plaintiffs challenging schools on religious grounds of their ability to collect attorneys’ fees? Wouldn’t apply in this case. Nope, that law would only apply to Establishment Clause challenges, where a public school or government is promoting a particular religion and thereby offending people who do not belong to that religion. A case like this isn’t arguing that the school is “establishing” a religion, so it falls outside the scope of that bill.
So, in effect, the proposed law would ensure that plaintiffs represented by the Rutherford Institute would be able to collect attorneys’ fees, but plaintiffs represented by the ACLU would not.
I found this in about thirty seconds of Googling. Why can’t the Post do the same?