As grieving parents, family and friends try to deal with the tragedy of the Chardon High School killings, at least one commentator is cackling with glee. For Todd Starnes of (where else?) Fox News, the killings give him the perfect opportunity to ask, “Why is school prayer only allowed during tragedies?”
As police try to make sense of the senseless, the school superintendent called on people to pray.
It was a wise decision.
But perhaps lost in the chaos is the irony that in American public schools – people are not allowed to pray.
Liberals have successfully banished God from the classroom, replacing Him with the manmade god of secularism.
Yes, those darned liberals and their support for liberal handgun access. Oh wait, no, sorry, handguns are real, and aren’t really a liberal thing. Let’s blame an imaginary response by an imaginary God to an imaginary ban on people praying. Because everybody knows that if you don’t let God into the classroom, He gives handguns to emotionally unstable kids and tells them to go kill people—even when He’s not really banned from school.
Exactly! Even a cursory review of history will show how many problems prayer has solved. Besides, if anybody’s going to get shot, it should be the ecclesiastics doing it.
Sorry, WordPress had a little hiccup somehow and published just the quote from Fox News without the rest of what I wrote. I’ve fixed that now, but if it seems to change the context of your comment, that’s why.
So, we’re not in agreement after all? 😉
What’s funny is the whole argument is a strawman anyway. Like this:
Of course they are allowed to pray. The only thing that isn’t allowed is for a public school to lead classes in prayer. Somehow that equates to banning prayer entirely. I’m a veteran of 12 years of Catholic school, but a friend of mine went to a public school and told me about the various students that would pray to themselves before eating at lunch. In a public school! Prayer! Gasp! Of course, this was in that golden godly decade of the 90s (ha), so maybe things have changed since then. Still, the idea that we’re outright banning prayer in public schools is so far from the truth that it makes this Fox Noise godbotherer’s argument Not Even Wrong.
ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH!!!
So. Blatantly. False. But it’s Fox News so I’m not surprised. People are allowed to pray, pray all you want. Pray 24 hours a day if you care. Pray before your lessons, pray before your tests, pray before your lunch, pray before you go to the bathroom. I don’t care! Just don’t force people to pray who do not want to while you’re speaking from a position of authority as a representative of the United States Government! *headdesk, headdesk, headdesk*
I’ve taken to mentally replacing calls for prayer with calls to write to Santa.
Why in the world would it be a “wise thing” to pray?
The wise thing would be to pass laws making sure unstable children can’t steal guns from their grandfather’s barn. You know, require gun safes and gun locks…stuff like that.
Isn’t it funny how a being supposedly so powerful it can create life, the universe, and everything ex nihilo; is so weak that it easily succumbs to a ~200 year old piece of paper?
But Jesus wanted this to happen, for those kids to die.
Don’t they know everything is part of his plan?
Grod I hate this kind of crap.
“Liberals” and Catholics and Jews and, believe it or not, Baptists, after a long and drawn out political fight, managed to get state-mandated Protestantism ousted from the public classrooms. They did not banish “God”. Students can feel free to pray whenever they want, they just do not have to be coerced into praying by authority figures.
I imagine that all it would take to set this understanding in people’s heads is if a Muslim teacher tried to lead his/her class in a Friday prayer. I imagine that suddenly a lot of people in a community might get an education in how freedom of religion protects them as well as the non-believers.
Yet another crucial fiction from the religion of crucifixion.
Yet another problem that doesn’t exist invented by the religion that invented a “solution” to problems that don’t exist.
.
Ah, the Christian persecution complex. They say the secular liberals run things then say this is a Christian nation.