Rev. Terry Hodges of First Baptist Church in Odessa, said that if Amendment 2 passes, it will “level the playing field.”
Hodges said Christians “enjoyed home-field advantage” for the country’s first 150 years. “That’s changed, and now there’s a hostility toward Christians,” he said.
I think what’s changed is that Protestants miss having unchallenged supremacy. Interesting that they managed to get Missouri’s four Catholic bishops to sign on. But my experience in Iowa has told me they will be far from likely to get their public school students to lead other Christians in the Rosary.
I don’t know that this will be a “jobs bill for lawyers.” But it sure seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. As a parent of a public school student, I’m relieved that high school faculty and staff aren’t coercing my daughter with evangelical Christian prayers of the squinty eyed concentration sort. A right-to-pray law will have to provide some sort of equal access, I would think. How many evangelicals would welcome the Prayer of St Michael every tenth prayer? Or something Wiccan their way coming every so often.
Let the voting begin. Then the legal challenges. Then the lawyer fees. Then the Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, and whatnot prayers to follow.
7 August 2012 at 6:55 am
The fun part is how this interacts with the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal constitution (the First Amendment does not exist in Olympian splendor above the Fourteenth): in an increasingly heterogenous society in terms of belief, that means monotheists (Christians, Jews, yes Muslims, and Sikhs, for example) don’t enjoy any privilege over polytheists, animists, occultists, et cet. So, whatever Baptists get to do, so do those folks, and government cannot prefer the former over the latter.
9 August 2012 at 6:35 pm
The reality is that in Misery there aren’t too many students who are polytheists, animists, occulists, etc. and, if there are, are they really prepared to stand up in front of their peers and utter what they want to say, understanding the abuse they will suffer thereafter? The preponderence of prayers will be of stultifying fundigelical “squinty-eyed” type that turns incipient teenaged believers into screaming adult atheists.