ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 18, 1996 TAG: 9601180047
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHLEEN CLEAVER
RELIGIOUS discrimination is alive and well, and taxpayer-funded.
Ninth-grader Brittney Settle received an assignment in her public high school class to write a research paper on any topic that was ``interesting, researchable and decent.''
While her classmates chose ``Spiritualism,'' ``Reincarnation'' and ``Magic Throughout History,'' Brittney chose to write on ``The Life of Jesus Christ.'' Brittney's teacher, citing reasons revealing ignorance and bigotry, rejected the paper, and gave Brittney a zero.
The teacher was supported by the School Board, the federal District Court, and the federal Court of Appeals. Now the U.S. Supreme Court, Brittney's last hope, has rejected her appeal.
Brittney's ``zero'' was government-sponsored discrimination against religious speech. The violation of Brittney's First Amendment right is reflective of a disturbingly recurrent pattern of discrimination against religious expression.
Even President Clinton has acknowledged that ``some Americans have been denied the right to express their religion.'' Reps. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., and Earnest Istook, R-Okla., have been working recently on a ``religious liberty'' amendment to the Constitution aimed at prohibiting religious discrimination.
Hyde and Istook want to restore the internal balance of the First Amendment upset by confused Supreme Court jurisprudence, and to clarify that government may not discriminate against religious people in the name of the Establishment Clause.
The goal is true government neutrality. America's public schools are not the only places where religious people experience discrimination. Meet Larry Witters, a young man from Washington state with a progressive eye condition. Witters, wanting to try to beat the odds against him from his disability, applied for vocational rehabilitation assistance for the blind. The state program made grants to blind students seeking business degrees, but denied Witters the assistance to which he was entitled because he wanted to study to become a pastor.
In the name of the Establishment Clause, the state court approved of this discriminatory treatment, and the Supreme Court let the ruling stand, shouldering Witters with another disability to overcome.
Few realize that the First Amendment forbids government from establishing a religion so that the people are truly free to practice the religion of their choice. Yet, in the last half-century, the Supreme Court has turned the First Amendment on its head.
The ever-expanding concept of ``establishment'' has come full circle from forbidding government actions that impede religious expression to requiring them. In its tenacious struggle to avoid even tenuous appearances of support for religion, government repeatedly has resorted to the constitutionally ``safe'' practice of active opposition to religion. Yet, such a practice does violence to our other First Amendment rights.
With any form of discrimination, one group is harmed while another is helped. True religionists have been harmed by current state-sanctioned religious discrimination, and are eager for relief. Those hostile to religion will vigorously defend their place of privilege. The principle of government neutrality is not new - it is the aim and result of the First Amendment properly understood.
A religious liberty amendment could restore this saving principle, so that our First Amendment would not be used to promote the empty state religion of secularism, but to promote true freedom, and the promise of freedom's fulfillment in truth, to which every American is entitled.
Cathleen A. Cleaver is the director of legal studies at the Family Research Council, a Washington D.C.-based research and advocacy organization.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
LENGTH: Medium: 73 linesby CNB