Psalm 108

For my weekly quiet time, I studied Psalm 108.  The content of Psalm 108:1-5 is also found in Psalm 57:7-11, and the content of Psalm 108:6-13 is also in Psalm 60:5-12.  Psalm 57:1-6 contains the Psalmist's hope that God might deliver him from his enemies, then Psalm 57:7-11 talks about the Psalmist singing God's praise among the nations, God's mercy, and the Psalmist's desire that God might be exalted.  Psalm 60 reflects the Psalmist's disappointment at his people's painful setbacks in battle, and Psalm 60:5-12 requests God's deliverance, affirms the Psalmist's belief that God is in control of the land of Israel and surrounding nations, and expresses hope that God will assist God's people in battle.

What is the impression that is made when Psalm 108 copies and pastes (if you will) Psalm 57:7-11, and follows that up with Psalm 60:5-12?  What we have is the Psalmist in Psalm 108 first talking about singing God's praises among the nations, God's mercy, and the Psalmist's desire that God be exalted, and then following that up with a request for God's deliverance, an affirmation of God's control over Israel and surrounding nations, and an expression of hope that God will assist God's people.  I'd say that Psalm 108 is much more positive than Psalm 57 and Psalm 60, for Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 focus a lot on problems, whereas Psalm 108 highlights the solution, namely, the sovereign and merciful God.  Moreover, Psalm 108 starts by affirming the importance of praising God before it asks God to help God's people, whereas Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 start out by describing the problems, then they turn their attention more to the solution. 

Psalm 108 reminds me of the Lord's Prayer, whose first half is about God's exaltation and overall agenda (i.e., the kingdom of God), whereas the second half contains the petitioner's requests----for food, forgiveness, and deliverance from temptation.  In essence, God comes first in the Lord's Prayer, then the petitioner's needs.  I also think of II Chronicles 20:21-22, in which King Jehoshaphat of Judah puts the praise choir in front of the Judahite army as it goes out to confront the aggressive Moabites and Ammonites.

I can identify with Psalm 57 and Psalm 60, in which the Psalmist vents about his problems before he gets to praising God. I have found myself in those sorts of situations: I need to let out my anger and fear in prayer before I can feel sufficiently at peace to praise God.  But I can also understand why Psalm 108 goes another route: sometimes, it's important for me to remind myself of God's greatness before I get to my problems in prayer, for a variety of reasons: to affirm that my problems are small compared to God, to highlight that God is more important than I am (as eager as God is to hear about my problems, since God loves me), and to remember that God has an agenda that is above and beyond me, yet also includes me.

A number of scholars date Psalm 108 to Israel's post-exilic period.  The Orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary says that, whereas Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 concerned "the consolidation and power of David's own reign", Psalm 108 is about the Messiah.  Perhaps the commentary means that Psalm 108 expresses Israel's hope for a coming Messiah who will deliver her.

In my opinion, both interpretations make sense of the structure of Psalm 108.  Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 appear to concern emergency situations----a person is harassed by enemies, one's army is doing poorly in battle.  Some argue that these Psalms reflected David's problems, whereas others contend that they were Psalms that were to be used for certain emergency situations.  Either way, the relevance of Psalm 57 and Psalm 60 to a context of emergency is probably why these Psalms frantically focus on problems before they arrive at a a greater state of hope.  Psalm 108, however, within a post-exilic context or a context in which Israel is hoping for a Messiah, is not set in an emergency situation.  At least that's my opinion.  Granted, Israel does not regard her situation as ideal or even as positive, for she desires God's intervention.  And there may still be times when she especially feels the heavy hand of her oppressors and thus earnestly yearns for redemption.  But, overall, she's not in an emergency situation, but rather a long-term period of national ills that she experiences.  Because every day stinks, she's not particularly frantic.  Consequently, her method of prayer as she attempts to cope with this long-term problem is to comfort herself with the realization that God is good and sovereign, and then to express the hope that God will assist her in battle and restore her sovereignty.

Sheila Suess Kennedy: Republican in the ACLU 4

In my latest reading of What's a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing in the ACLU?, Sheila Suess Kennedy talks about the issues of gay rights and the criminal justice system.  What I'd like to do in this post, however, is to interact with something that Kennedy says on pages 105-106.  Kennedy is distinguishing between civil liberties and civil rights, and she defines civil liberties as "the rights secured to citizens against government infringement."

"Civil rights, on the other hand, entitle us to freedom from discrimination by nongovernmental employers, landlords, and proprietors of public accommodations.  Civil liberties don't do a whole lot of good if the only factory in town can decide not to hire women, the only apartment complex won't rent to African-Americans, and the diner won't serve Jews.  Civil rights statutes prohibit such private sector discrimination.  While the ACLU is a civil liberties organization, we favor civil rights laws.  So, historically, has the Republican party.  Both would agree that there must be limits to government's authority to require equal treatment by private parties.  Unlike restraints on government action, civil rights laws restrict the freedom of those who are discriminating and thus must be carefully crafted and narrowly targeted.  Religious enterprises must be allowed to insist on conformity with doctrine, for example, even if that doctrine operates in a discriminatory manner.  The behavior of private parties not engaged in commerce cannot be compelled.  But within the limits imposed, we agree with most Americans that businesses ought not be able to reject people for characteristics having nothing to do with their performance as employees or their behavior as tenants or customers.  Currently, in 1997, gays are protected against such discrimination in exactly nine states (and some assorted cities)."

I agree with much of what Kennedy says in that passage.  For one, I think that it is awful for people to be fired for something that has nothing to do with their job performance, whether that be race, gender, or sexual-orientation.  Second, I believe that there are more sources of oppression out there than the government, such as private interests.  That consideration is why I personally am not a full-fledged libertarian.

I guess that my quibble with the passage is that I wonder how Kennedy would reconcile it with her less-government political philosophy.  While Kennedy is correct that there were many Republicans who supported civil rights laws, my impression is that the conservative Goldwater wing of the Republican Party that she champions in the book did not particularly care for them, at least not during the 1960's.  Barry Goldwater was all for banning government discrimination against African-Americans, and he himself supported integration in Arizona.  But he did not support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it forbade private interests from discriminating, and he regarded that to be an infringement on individual liberty.  You hear similar sentiments expressed by certain libertarians today, such as Ron Paul and Rand Paul.

As far as I could see, Kennedy does not seek to harmonize her support for anti-discrimination civil rights laws with her belief in less-government and individual liberty.  How could one reconcile the two?  Could one say that the government should stay out unless one person harms another, and one person is harming another when he fires someone for something that has nothing to do with his or her job performance?  Could one say that conservatism or libertarianism values treating people as individuals rather than as part of a group, and firing people just for being gay or African-American does the exact opposite?  I don't know.  In my opinion, just saying that discrimination should be banned because it's wrong would be problematic in terms of Kennedy's positions throughout this book, for she often has a problem with people wanting to ban something just because they think that it's wrong.  I wish that, in her chapter on gay rights, she had wrestled more with the question of how her support for anti-discrimination civil rights laws can be reconciled with her political philosophy on the role of government.

And yet, Kennedy's philosophy about the role of government still seems to influence the passage that I quoted, for Kennedy realizes that bringing government into a situation is a delicate matter.  Consequently, she wants for civil rights laws to be "carefully crafted and narrowly targeted", unlike the vague anti-pornography laws (or proposed laws) that she criticizes in the book.  She also wants for the government to respect the liberty of private interests to discriminate in certain areas, such as the right of religious groups to discriminate when doing so is consistent with their doctrines.  My impression is that, for Kennedy, the government telling individuals what they can and cannot do is not a step that should be taken lightly, and so there should be measures to insure that the government does not unnecessarily curtail liberty.

But does allowing the government to ban private discrimination put us on a slippery-slope?  There have been advocates for small government who have answered "yes" to that----particularly during the 1960's.  If the government steps outside of its role of protecting the individual's right to life, liberty, and property, a la John Locke, are we on a slippery slope towards totalitarianism?  Kennedy, although she is a supporter of civil rights laws that ban discrimination by private interests, herself fears that granting the government certain powers can lead to results that are deleterious to personal liberty.

I guess that, speaking for myself, I'm tempted to say that we should look at each situation on a case-by-case basis.  I think that firing people for being gay is wrong, and so it should be banned, and I don't believe that the government should limit itself to protecting the individual's life, liberty, and property, a la John Locke.  Again, I'm not a libertarian.  At the same time, though, I probably should have crisp principles for what the government should and should not do, otherwise what would prevent the government from getting out of control and becoming authoritarian?  I think that Kennedy departs somewhat from her less-government, pro-individual liberty absolutism in her treatment of anti-discrimination laws, but perhaps she is a model for how to approach the role of government when she seeks to draw from the principles of her political philosophy in delineating what anti-discrimination laws should and should not do.  In that case, she is not an absolutist, but she is still guided by principles (i.e., a commitment to individual liberty).

Learning from Each Other...

In my latest reading of No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions, Paul Knitter interacts with the view that all religions are essentially the same.  Granted, this view acknowledges that the religions of the world have their differences, but it maintains that, at their core, there are commonalities----such as losing self-centeredness and entering a state of harmony with someone or something larger than oneself.

Does God interact with people in other religions----and, by "other", I mean non-Christian?  Suppose that we have a religion that doesn't believe in a personal God.  Does the God of Christianity interact with someone who believes in that religion----even if that person does not recognize that the higher power or transcendent reality with which he is interacting is the personal God of Christianity?

But then I wonder something else.  Suppose that the answer to my questions above is "yes"----the God of Christianity does interact with people from other religions, even if they don't know or think that they are interacting with the God of Christianity.  Does not that imply that people from other religions can learn from Christians, and not vice-versa, since Christians know the truth about the spiritual experience that people from other religions are experiencing?  If Christians are right and other religions are not-quite-right, what can Christians learn from other religions?

Well, maybe Christians can learn something.  I remember hearing Tim Keller say that a good reason for Christian community is that we can get to know Jesus more by learning about other Christians' experiences of Jesus----and we get a richer and broader picture thereby because Jesus does not relate to all of us in the exact same way.  Tim Keller most likely wouldn't approve of my pluralistic application of his point, but couldn't we have the same sort of approach to other religions:  We can learn more about the divine by seeing how others----even people in non-Christian religions----interact with God, as we learn from their experiences and how they conceptualize them?

But then there's another question.  If that's the case, were people spiritually poorer and deficient in their knowledge of God before the era of inter-religious dialogue and multiculturalism?  Well, perhaps God gave them enough knowledge of himself so they could get through.  At the same time, there's nothing wrong with realizing that there is still much to learn, and that knowledge of God can increase over the years.

Robert Bork

Robert Bork has passed on.  Bork was a conservative whom President Ronald Reagan nominated to be on the U.S. Supreme Court, but the U.S. Senate voted against his confirmation, and the empty slot eventually went to Anthony Kennedy instead.  Liberal Senators attacked Bork so vehemently that the name "Bork" became a verb meaning "To defeat a judicial nomination through a concerted attack on the nominee's character, background and philosophy" (see here).

Senator Edward Kennedy made the provocative statement on the Senate floor that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy."  See here. 

Bork denied Kennedy's characterization of his positions.  It would be interesting to read Bork's thoughts at some time.  Bork was an intelligent man, who taught at Yale Law School (and two of his students were Bill and Hillary Clinton!).  I own a copy of his Tempting of America, but it is not with me.  Maybe I can find it at my Dad's house when I go back to Indiana this coming February for my sister's wedding.  In the past, I did not read the book because I feared that I would not not understand it, but by now I have taken a class in constitutional law, followed the news, watched judicial hearings on C-Span, and read a lot of books, so I'd probably be able to understand Bork's book better were I to read it now.  And, of course, I would blog through it!

When I took a class on constitutional law at DePauw University, my professor said that Bork was an originalist, who wanted for constitutional interpretation to be based on the original intent behind the Constitution.  Overall, that is probably correct.  And yet, as I read about Bork last night, I saw that he realized that things could get pretty murky when it came to interpreting the Constitution according to its original intent.  On Brown vs. the Board of Education, for example, Bork realized that many of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratifiers did not believe that segregation was incompatible with equality, and yet Bork said that we can see that legal segregation in the South contributed to inequality between whites and African-Americans.  You have an originalist tension here: Do you go with the mindset of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratifiers, or do you go with the goal of the Fourteenth Amendment itself?  Because the aim of the Fourteenth Amendment was equality under the law, Bork supported Brown's ban on legally segregated public schools.  (See here for the quote about Brown from Bork's Tempting of America.)

Bork may have backtracked from originalism in his approach to the Second Amendment.  This review of Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah quotes Bork as saying: "The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose" (p. 166n).  This intrigued me because of the debates about the Second Amendment, especially after the recent school shooting.  Some argue that the Second Amendment primarily concerns the militia, like the National Guard, whereas others contend that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms, one reason being that the Founders wanted for people to be able to stand against their government if it becomes too oppressive.  Bork appears to hold to a combination of these two perspectives: yes, the Second Amendment concerns state militias, but the Amendment exists so that the states could defend themselves from the national government if it became overly oppressive.  But Bork does not seem to think that such a rationale would work nowadays, when weaponry is much more advanced.  I don't have access to Bork's book, but is Bork acknowledging that there are times when constitutional interpretation has to take into consideration new realities, rather than just focusing on original intent?

I'd like to mention one more thing: When the Alito hearings (I think) were going on, C-Span was playing the Bork hearings, and I watched some of them.  I thought it was cool that Bork was being questioned about his beard, and Bork explained its history!

As someone who leans more to the Left, I'm glad that Robert Bork was not on the Supreme Court.  But I do admire his mind, not to mention the boldness and the courage that he displayed when he was under attack from his liberal critics!  Someday, I'd like to engage his works, even if I end up disagreeing with most of what he had to say.

Sheila Suess Kennedy: Republican in the ACLU 3

My topic for my write-up today on Sheila Suess Kennedy's What's a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing in the ACLU? will be the mission of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU's mission is to defend people's constitutional rights, even if those people are unpopular with the majority.  There have been notable times in U.S. history when that mission has led the ACLU to do some very heroic deeds.  As Kennedy narrates on pages 40-41:

"In 1933, when the government tried to ban importation of James Joyce's Ulysses as obscene, the ACLU won a ruling that the First Amendment prohibited such censorship.  When a 1925 law was passed in Tennessee making it a crime to teach evolution in the public schools, it was Clarence Darrow, a member of the ACLU national committee, who headed the team of volunteer lawyers.  In the 1930s, when West Virginia adopted a resolution allowing the expulsion of public school students who refused to salute the flag, the ACLU represented the children of Jehovah's Witnesses whose religious beliefs forbade them to salute.  In 1932, when the Scottsboro boys----nine black Alabama youths charged with raping two white women----were denied the assistance of counsel during a trial in which they were sentenced to death, the ACLU won a ruling that established the right of defendants to representation by a lawyer.  In these and numerous other well-known cases, the ACLU has represented individuals against arbitrary and overreaching government action."

But there are a number of times when many wonder why the ACLU sticks it neck out for certain people.  Why does the ACLU go to bat for a kid who is suspended from school for wearing an earring, or someone who owns a nudie bar, or someone who didn't care for the prayer at a public school's ceremony, or people who want to listen to music that has trashy lyrics?

In many cases, Kennedy uses what some would characterize as the slippery-slope argument: if you allow the government to infringe on people's rights in these cases, what is to prevent the government from infringing on your rights?  Many would say that the slippery-slope argument is a logical fallacy and that people should focus on the issue at hand rather than on where the issue could lead.  But personally, I don't have a great problem with certain uses of the slippery-slope argument.  In the case of the ACLU, its position is that people have rights and the government should not infringe on those rights.  If the government is allowed to infringe on anyone's rights, even if that person is unpopular, that sets a bad precedent.  What would keep the government from infringing on your rights?  The Bill of Rights?  Well, the Bill of Rights is pretty meaningless if it is not consistently applied and enforced.  As Kennedy says in her book, you cannot be selectively totalitarian.  For the ACLU, the Bill of Rights should be the arbiter, not the will of the majority or whether a person or a cause is popular or unpopular, good or bad.  Moreover, laying aside for a second the slippery-slope argument, I think that Kennedy makes a good case that there are issues at hand that are problematic in their own right: anti-pornography ordinances that are vague about what pornography is, a conservative group that regards the movie Toy Story as pornographic, etc.

But there are conservatives who have problems with the ACLU's mission, for they believe that there should be more to public policy discussions than people's rights.  Granted, a number of the principles that Kennedy discusses in this book have been affirmed by conservatives.  Kennedy is critical of allowing the majority to trample on the rights of the minority, and I have read conservatives who have expressed similar concerns about majority rule: William F. Buckley in Up from Liberalism (see my post here), the John Birch Society when it stresses that the United States is not a democracy but a republic (see my post here), etc.  At the same time, there are many conservatives who believe that we should value more principles than individual rights: traditions, morality, family, the stability of the community, etc.  One conservative told me that it was wrong for the ACLU to defend Nazis who were marching through a Jewish neighborhood, for what the Nazis did was grossly insensitive.  For my friend, there should be more to the discussion than people's rights, such as consideration for others.

I don't want to make Kennedy's position into a straw-person by saying that she wants to make rights the only thing that matters.  She does, after all, express concern about the moral decline of America, and she seems to believe that people should take action if something offends them.  For example, if someone does not like a raunchy video that a video-store is selling (back when this book was written, videos were still popular), then he should call the video-store owner!  What Kennedy deems problematic, however, is the government stepping in and infringing on people's freedom of expression.

On pages 92-93, Kennedy manifests an awareness that a libertarian focus on individual rights can get pretty sticky:

"Those of us who defend the libertarian principle sometimes explain it thusly: You may swing your fist until it comes into contact with my nose.  In other words, individuals may enjoy the maximum liberty compatible with an absence of social harm.  Simple.  Except there are as many definitions of social harm as there are people on the planet.  You have a right to smoke a cigarette, but do you have a right to fill my environment with passive smoke?  You have a right to drive a motorcycle, but does that include a right to drive up the cost of automobile insurance for those who drive safe little sedans and never fail to buckle up?  What if I am convinced that your 'art' is a pollution of the culture that undermines the quality of life for everyone?  Suddenly, what was simple no longer is quite so straightforward."

I'm leery about saying that rights should be the most important factor in public policy discussions, for I believe that the health of the community is also important.  But I also recognize that a number of abuses throughout history have occurred in the name of protecting the health of the community, and so I'm reluctant to compromise on individual rights.

Truth Amidst Diversity and Flux

I started Paul F. Knitter's No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions.  In my latest reading, Knitter discussed the thought of Ernst Troeltsch, a theologian who highlighted the dynamic nature of history.

I guess my question is this: Is there truth, even though there are a lot of religions and cultures out there, and even though we are all part of an in-flux historical process in which people and ideas change?  I'd say that, on a certain level, the answer is yes.  Or let me rephrase that: I don't think that the existence of different religions and cultures and the dynamic nature of history necessarily mean that there is no truth.  There can be one right religion, while others make incorrect claims.  Other cultures may do things that we in twenty-first century America judge to be wrong: I think of widows in India immolating themselves.  And there are things that were done in history that many of us in twenty-first century America deem to be immoral, such as the Holocaust, the unjust treatment of Native Americans, etc.  Do we seriously want to rob ourselves of the right to make those kinds of moral judgments?  If not, then we have to admit that there is a truth that transcends religions, cultures, and historical contexts.

Would Troeltsch agree with me on this?  To be honest, after reading Knitter, I'm not entirely sure.  On the one hand, Troeltsch was somewhat of a relativist, who thought that Hinduism was right for Hindus and Christianity was right for Christians.  At first, he tried to argue that Christianity was superior to a number of other religions----because it had a personal God, for example----but he backed away from that.  On the other hand, Troeltsch believed that there was some divine revelation to humanity, and that God was somehow "immanent...within our very being" (Knitter's words on page 25).  That's why we see in most cultures a desire to search for more, to need, and to love. 

I'd say there's a truth.  But do I equate that truth with the Bible or Christianity?  I have issues with taking that step because the Bible itself appears to reflect its culture, in a number of cases, and in doing so it sometimes offends our moral sensibilities.  We see in the Bible that slavery is condoned (Leviticus 25), and that women in the Torah are regarded as second-class citizens (Numbers 30).  Even a number of conservative Christians would say that these ideas are not normative for today but reflect the times when they were written down.  In making that claim, they move somewhat in the direction of Troeltsch, who highlighted that people and cultures change throughout history.

What is truth, then?  I'd say that it includes our twenty-first century moral sensibilities----at least those in the U.S., and perhaps elsewhere.  Does that sound rather imperialist?  And why should I assume that my culture is superior?  Well, maybe there are areas in which my culture is wrong----our individualism and materialism arguably go too far, for example.  But do we really want to get to the point where we can't say that widows immolating themselves in India is wrong?

Perhaps I can say that history is in flux, and yet God is somehow involved in it, leading people to what is right.  Yes, there is morality throughout the world, and throughout history.  Yes, people desire something more, and they want to love.  I guess my question then would be this: Why hasn't God revealed more in the past?  Why could people treat others as second-class citizens, without even a second thought?  Or maybe, deep within some elements of humanity, there were second thoughts about the bad things that were going on, and that was a reflection of the image of God. 

Sheila Suess Kennedy: Republican in the ACLU 2

My latest reading of Sheila Suess Kennedy's What's a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing in the ACLU? justified the mission of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as well as discussed the Establishment Clause.  I'll focus on the mission of the ACLU in tomorrow's post.  In my post today, however, I'll talk some about what Kennedy says about church and state issues.

Why is Kennedy opposed to government-sponsored prayer in public schools?  In my latest reading of Kennedy's book, I saw a variety of reasons: the First Amendment prescribes government neutrality on religion; public school children should not be a captive audience while public school authorities promote a religion; the role of instructing children in religion belongs to their families, not the state; etc.

In one case, I thought that Kennedy was not entirely clear about what is permitted in public schools and what is not.  On page 52, for example, she quotes from an article that she wrote in which she states that "The [Supreme] Court did not say [in the 1992 decision Lee vs. Weisman] that graduation speakers cannot refer to God, or that seniors cannot sing a song that mentions God." But later in the article she says that "When a school has the right to select its graduation speakers and approve their speeches, that is considered an endorsement of what they say", and so "If the speaker offers a prayer, the school has legally endorsed that prayer", which the public school cannot legally do.  So can graduation speakers refer to God or not?  If the public school is approving of a speech that mentions God, is that the public school sanctioning a religion, making the speech unconstitutional at the graduation ceremony?  Or would that simply be the public school championing free speech and the right of a graduation speaker to voice her own opinion, not an endorsement of a particular religion?

Overall, Kennedy made good arguments in her chapters that discussed the Establishment Clause.  She defended her separationist view of the Establishment Clause through an appeal to U.S. history, and she ably attacked the notion that problems increased in public schools after the 1962 Supreme Court decision banning government-sponsored prayer in public schools through a variety of arguments: for example, she noted that most public schools prior to 1962 did not even have government-sponsored school prayer, since a number of state Supreme Courts prohibited it in interpreting their own states' constitutions.  Kennedy also sought to debunk the idea that the ACLU is against students expressing their religious beliefs in public schools, for she said that the ACLU would actually defend a student who was punished for reading the Bible on the bus or for praying before lunch in the school cafeteria.  (Kennedy said on page 56 that prayer before eating the cafeteria meatloaf is "a prudent precaution in most school cafeterias"!)  She also denied that she opposes public schools teaching about religion as part of an academic subject.  What she and the ACLU oppose is the government encouraging people to adopt a religious belief.

I have a question, though.  In an interview here, Kennedy states: "Can Johnny get out of Biology because they’re teaching evolution? No, because they’re supposed to be teaching science, not religion. But, can Johnny get out of going to the Halloween party, yeah, because the Halloween party isn’t central to the school’s mission."  I realize that Kennedy would most likely disagree with the people on the religious right who hold that evolution is part of the sinister religion of secular humanism (as if secular humanism is a religion), for she'd regard evolution as science, pure and simple (as do I).  But, in my opinion, teaching evolution in public schools and compelling students to be in the classroom while it is taught pose some of the same problems as government-sanctioned prayer in public schools.  Students with conservative Christian backgrounds are being told that the origins narrative that they learned at home and at church is wrong; even if that is not said explicitly, teaching evolution as fact challenges the literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3 that many conservative Christians hold.  How is that government neutrality regarding religion?  And, if Kennedy agrees with parents who don't want prayer in public schools because they (the parents) want the authority to teach their kids religion, why would that same consideration not apply to parents who don't want their children hearing in public school classrooms that evolution is fact, or is a viable theory, because they themselves want to teach their children which origins narrative is best?  I should note: Personally, I'm all for teaching about evolution in public schools.  But I believe that it should be done with a degree of sensitivity towards people's religious beliefs.  Teachers can go ahead and be insensitive all they want, regarding conservative Christians who don't believe in evolution as ignorant rubes, but that won't accomplish anything constructive----mostly it will invite backlash and resistance.

I'd like to close this post by talking about Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican who ran for President in 1964.  After talking about Republican Congressman (at the time) David MacIntosh's support for community-sanctioned prayer in public schools, Kennedy asks on page 68, "What has happened to the Republican party between Goldwater and MacIntosh?"  On the preceding page, Kennedy referred to a 1981 speech in which Goldwater defended the separation of church and state.  Barry Goldwater looms large in Kennedy's book, for Kennedy often quotes Goldwater's classic, The Conscience of a Conservative.  The implication that I get is that she regards herself as a Republican who is true to Goldwater conservatism, while she believes that Republicans adhering to or influenced by the religious right have strayed significantly from that.  I do not entirely agree with her on this, however, for there was a sense in which cultural conservatism was a part of Goldwater's candidacy, which was during a time of cultural upheaval.  Goldwater even expressed opposition to the Supreme Court decision banning government-led prayer from public schools.  See here for more information, or google "Goldwater AND school prayer".  Granted, Goldwater later in his career was an outspoken critic of the religious right, but he still championed a form of cultural conservatism in his 1964 campaign.

But, at the same time, I think that Goldwater's principles of less government and respect for rights that transcend the will of the majority can be adopted to support the position on the separation of church and state that Kennedy espouses, even if Goldwater did not take those principles in that direction in 1964.