Democrat Congressman Albert S. Herlong, Jr., of Florida, read into the U.S Congressional Record, January 10, 1963,
a list of Communist goals for America, (Vol 109, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, pp. A34-A35).
Communist goals included:
"Eliminate
prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the
ground that it violates the principle of 'separation of church and
state'...
Discredit American culture... Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce..."
Democrat Rep. Herlong continued listing Communist goals:
"Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as 'normal, natural, healthy'...
Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with 'social' religion...
Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a 'religious crutch'...
Control schools.
Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.
Soften curriculum.
Get control of teachers' associations. Put party line in textbooks...
Control student newspapers..."
AUGUST 11, 1984, by an 88-11 Senate vote and a 337-77 House vote, Congress passed the Equal Access Act, stating:
"It
shall be unlawful for any public secondary school which receives
Federal financial assistance and which has a limited open forum,
to
deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against,
any students who wish to conduct a meeting within that limited open
forum on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other
content of the speech at such meeting."
Regarding this, President Reagan commented August 23, 1984 at Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas:
"We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago
to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes
that a Young Marxist Society...would already enjoy."
The Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act by a vote of 8-1 in
Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, June 4, 1990:
"If
a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others,
then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion.
The
Establishment Clause does not license government to treat religion and
those who teach or practice it...as subversive of American ideals."
The Ten Commandments and their influence on American Law
Ronald Reagan stated in a radio address, February 25, 1984:
"Former
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted if religious exercises are
held to be impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an
artificial and state-created disadvantage.
Permission for such
exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly
to be neutral in the matter of religion.
And a refusal to permit
them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as
the establishment of a religion of secularism."
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U.S. District Court,
Crockett v. Sorenson, W.D. Va,. 1983:
"The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion.
When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established."
This reaffirmed what George Washington wrote to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia, May 10, 1789:
"If
I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the
Constitution framed by the Convention, where I had the honor to preside,
might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical
Society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it."
Ronald Reagan, on the National Day of Prayer, May 6, 1982, commented:
"Well-meaning
Americans in the name of freedom have taken freedom away. For the sake
of religious tolerance, they've forbidden religious practice."
Ronald Reagan told the Annual Convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, January 30, 1884:
"I was pleased last year to proclaim 1983 the Year of the Bible.
But,
you know, a group called the ACLU severely criticized me for doing
that. Well, I wear their indictment like a badge of honor."
In the Supreme Court case of
Town of Greece, NY, v. Galloway et al, Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision, May 5, 2014:
"Respondents
maintain that prayer must be nonsectarian...and they fault the town for
permitting guest chaplains to deliver prayers that 'use overtly
Christian terms' or 'invoke specifics of Christian theology'...
An
insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed
standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer...
The
Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to
invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort
respondents find objectionable.
One of the Senate's first
chaplains, the Rev. William White, gave prayers in a series that
included the Lord's Prayer, the Collect for Ash Wednesday, prayers for
peace and grace, a general thanksgiving, St. Chrysostom's Prayer, and a
prayer seeking 'the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c'..."
Justice Kennedy continued:
"The
decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as
the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is
today.
Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom...
To
hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the
legislatures...and the courts...to act as...censors of religious
speech...
Government may not mandate a civic religion that
stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than
it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy..."
Justice Kennedy added:
"Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God.
The
law and the Court could not draw this line for each specific prayer or
seek to require ministers to set aside their nuanced and deeply personal
beliefs for vague and artificial ones.
There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian..."
Justice Kennedy continued:
"While
these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek
peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its
people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in
religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws.
The first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress by the Rev. Jacob Duché on Sept. 7, 1774, provides an example:
'Be
Thou present O God of Wisdom and direct the counsel of this Honorable
Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest
foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order,
Harmony, and Peace be effectually restored, and the Truth and Justice,
Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people.
Preserve
the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down
on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings
as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with
everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and
through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen'...
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Justice Kennedy concluded:
"From the earliest days of the Nation, these invocations have been addressed to assemblies comprising many different creeds...
Our
tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can
tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a
person of a different faith."
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