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By Kathleen Parker
All things considered, I’d rather be in Rome. Wouldn’t everyone?
Tout le journalism monde has descended on Rome since Pope Benedict XVI’s surprise retirement last month. The ensuing Vatican intrigue has been appropriately sumptuous: Was it the gay cabal? Blackmail? Did the butler do it?
And now what?
Parker is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.
By John Freivalds
When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints bought an old girl’s school in nearby Buena Vista and made it into Southern Virginia University, many of the evangelicals in town greeted them with suspicion. One local minister even went on his pulpit and warned, “You have to watch out for these Mormons; they will get your kids while they are young.”
Freivalds runs an international communications firm in Lexington.
By John Long
A bill on the way to Gov.Bob McDonnell’s desk raises some interesting questions concerning campus discrimination, the “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” and the necessity of colleges to pay for such assembly. McDonnell has yet to commit to signing it. I imagine if he does, court challenges lurk in the future. Still, it’s a debate that should continue on and off campus.
Long is a Roanoke Times columnist and director of the Salem Museum.
Legislators introduced more than 2,000 bills in Richmond this year, so a few of them are bound to slip by without careful scrutiny. Virginians, especially those with ties to the state’s colleges and universities, should not let SB 1074 be one of them. Sen. Mark Obenshain, who seeks the Republican nomination for attorney general this year, wants to force Virginians to subsidize discrimination on campus.
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Virginia students are free to pray in public schools, and free of the subtle coercion of sectarian prayer led by public schoolteachers. Virginia residents are free to pray before a government body, and free of the implied coercion of prayer led by their government officials.
These freedoms, guaranteed in the second Constitution of Virginia, adopted in 1830, remain encased in the constitution today in Article I, Section 16: “Free exercise of religion; no establishment of religion.”
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The debate about prayer at public meetings continues with no easy resolution in sight. Reader William Fell didn’t pull any punches yesterday:
Elected/appointed officials that are unable to perform there duties without babbling to an alleged sky-monster are a waste of taxpayer’s monies and a detriment to communities they work for.
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Readers have much to say about whether governments should open their meetings with prayers as well as the nature of religion and atheism. Justin True wrote:
I am an Atheist, but I put my best foot forward to make an attempt to not judge anyone at all. I am the first one to admit mistake and do my best to correct them. You can live your life the way you wish, but when someone comes along and pegs you for not living up to your own standards, that is your issue not ours.
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I have read many posts by Ms. Saunders and we see eye-to-eye on many things, we do not see eye-to-eye on religious affiliation, but we do agree on being tolerant of each other and learning to live among each other with peace and dignity.
I am a believer of freedom, I believe in freedom of speech. But I do not believe anyone has the right to shove their beliefs in my face whenever they want. I do not think prayer should be in our government not because I am an Atheist, but because I believe in the freedoms of every American, Christian or not.
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Fear, guns and elites in today’s letters to the editor.
Re: “Atheist group’s billboards in Roanoke area draw strong reaction,” Dec. 22 news story:
I encourage fellow Christians to consider a more thoughtful engagement with groups like the Blue Ridge Coalition of Reason than the emotional reactivity reported in the Dec.22 article. Vandalism does not fairly represent Christ, who “while we were yet sinners, died for us.”
The assumption that Christian belief has no evidence uses “evidence” too narrowly. The argument claims we can know only what we verify with our five senses or scientific inquiry. However, this assumption is not testable by the five senses or science. By its own criteria, it is unknowable.
Christians are called to “make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” Christians have compelling reasons for belief in God, revealed in nature, philosophy, history, archaeology and even science (among others).
If when reacting to different concepts we also reject the people who espouse them, we lose the chance to share those reasons. These billboards represent an opportunity to start a conversation. Christians need to be winsome in their arguments for faith if others are to consider the hope we have.
DAVID TAYLOR
FLOYD
By Annie Laurie Gaylor
Gaylor is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Prayer at government meetings is unnecessary, inappropriate and divisive. Calling upon other elected officials and citizens to rise and pray is coercive, embarrassing and beyond the scope of county government. Supervisors, after all, are free to pray privately or to worship on their own time in their own way. They don’t need to worship on taxpayers’ time. That line between the Jeffersonian “wall of separation between church and state” is being crossed when elected officials misuse their authority to promote their personal religious views at government functions.
A government board ought not to lend its power and prestige to religion. Such governmental endorsement of religion excludes the 15 percent of the American population that is nonreligious (American Religious Identification Survey 2008), including more than 1 million Virginians.
The numbers of nonreligious are growing rapidly in this country, as shown by the Pew Forum’s survey last year finding one in five adults has no religious affiliation. We nonreligious citizens are offended, excluded and made to feel like political outsiders when our government oversteps its power to conduct or impose prayer. Since government prayer often invokes Jesus and Christianity, it also turns those of other faiths into second-class citizens.
America was founded in part by refugees seeking freedom from religion in government. They sought to escape tyrants who told them which church to support, what religious rituals to engage in, or what to believe or disbelieve. Whether to pray, whether to believe in a god who answers prayer, is an intensely personal decision protected under our First Amendment as a paramount matter of conscience.
The U.S. founders who adopted our entirely godless Constitution knew there can be no religious liberty without the freedom to dissent. If the framers of our Constitution found no need to pray when they adopted our secular Constitution, why does the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors need to pray over sewers, building permits and variances? Isn’t it a bit vain to imagine that a deity, if there is one, would be interested in the prayerful demands of supervisors anyway?
If constitutional injunctions do not impress, perhaps scriptural ones will. Christians who know their Bible are familiar with the biblical injunction of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, condemning public prayer as hypocrisy, and advising:
“Enter into thy closet and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.”
By Mathew Staver
Staver is chairman of Liberty Counsel and vice president of Liberty University.
Prayer is intricately woven into the very fabric of America. Public prayer and recognition of God in government meetings and by government officials has been a long-established practice, both before and after independence was declared.
In 1774 during the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, delegates voted to open each meeting with prayer. Ten months later, as war raged, these same men would call for a day of fasting and prayer throughout the colonies. The Second Continental Congress began with a prayer service in a Philadelphia church.
On July 9, 1776, just one day after the Declaration of Independence was first read publicly, the delegates voted unanimously for a chaplain of Congress, who immediately took the floor to offer a prayer. The first Senate resolved to hold a church service in St. Paul’s chapel immediately following the swearing in of President George Washington.
Opponents of prayer in public meetings often cry that the practice is a violation of the “separation of church and state.” But this phrase does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. Rather, Thomas Jefferson used it in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.
However, Jefferson also wrote another letter to William Johnson in 1823 in which he said it is important to “carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.” As president, Jefferson issued a proclamation to decree a day of “thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God” and included a prayer in both of his inaugural addresses.
Whenever James Madison — the father of the Constitution — would speak of an establishment of religion, he always meant it as a reference to the government giving preference to an “established” church, as Great Britain had done with the Church of England, never in reference to God, religious activities or public prayer. In 1853, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary wrote that the framers of the First Amendment “did not intend to prohibit a just expression of religious devotion by the legislators of the nation, even in their public character as legislators.”
Clearly the nation’s Founders never meant to remove prayer and references to God from the public square. Such a view is a distortion of the First Amendment and a denial of the principles in the nation’s birth certificate — the Declaration of Independence.
Guns and Israel in today’s letters to the editor.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, offers a sound response to gun violence in our schools. He proposes an armed safety officer in every elementary school in America.
If LaPierre’s “armed safety officer” means a trained, uniformed police officer, I see obvious benefits. Schools would have a central point of responsibility to prepare for and respond to violent acts, educators could concentrate on education instead of school violence, and students would have routine opportunities to react positively to a uniformed police officer.
The Virginia Board of Education identifies 1,173 elementary schools in Virginia. The minimum annual cost of a school safety officer (using Roanoke Police Department data) would be approximately $40,000. Therefore, LaPierre’s recommendation in Virginia would cost approximately $47 million annually.
Last year, 202,170 firearms background checks were conducted in Virginia. If each background check equates to one firearm purchase, then a School Safety Fee of $232 added to the cost of a firearm would pay for one safety officer in each Virginia elementary school. With NRA support, now is the opportune time for the Virginia General Assembly to respond to the school violence issue.
ROBERT F. CANOVA
ROANOKE
