(UNDATED) Question: What are the three most important words in President Obama’s Tuesday (Sept. 8) speech to America’s schoolchildren? Or any presidential speech, for that matter?
Answer: God bless America.
These three closing words of Obama’s speech encapsulate both the promise and the peril of Obama’s policy measures. They demonstrate the promise, because the president seems to be a God-fearing individual, like most of the rest of the population. They demonstrate the peril, because three little words won’t erase an anti-religious undercurrent in his administration.
I’ve been a little nervous about the trajectory of Obama’s administration ever since I heard about his embryonic stem cell research policies, which allow federally funded research on “left-over” embryos at fertility clinics.
Then I heard about Van Johnson, the so-called “green jobs czar” who was unceremoniously dumped in the middle of Labor Day weekend after news of his old 9/11 conspiracy theories reached the top of the president’s inbox.
The president did say “God bless America,” didn’t he?
Then, when I was reading about Obama’s speech to students, I heard about Kevin Jennings, who demonstrated, in unprintable terms, his disdain for those whom he terms the “religious right.”
Jennings is now Obama’s assistant secretary of education, overseeing the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Prior to his current job, for a decade and a half, he promoted educational products and services aimed at general acceptance of homosexual practices to children as young as 5 as founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). A good deal of the group’s work was — and is — supported by tax dollars.
GLSEN’s Web site says the group provides research and resources that document “anti-homosexual bias in education (K-12 schools)” as well as tools for educators and students to use in their communities.
OK. Except it depends on what you mean by “bias.” No one wants anyone, young or old, subject to discrimination or worse because of real or perceived lifestyle choices. Religious people are (or should be) the first to speak when individual rights are stomped upon. But, it is one thing to respect another’s views and quite another thing to promote them with tax dollars. That goes for any policy questions that touch on moral and ethical values.
If I understand the First Amendment correctly, the government cannot get involved in either promoting or attacking religious beliefs. These days, when folks try to bring political views consonant with their religious beliefs into the classroom — take abortion and embryo research as examples — they are stomped upon until they cry Uncle Sam.
It’s the same with sexuality. Religions see the body as good and sexuality as sacred. Different strains of different religions understand those tenets differently. But religious parents generally don’t want the government getting involved in their and their children’s private lives.
I’ve heard transcripts of GLSEN’s government-funded programs. Maybe they do include “Johnny thinks differently about his body,” and that’s fine. But they also include explicit instructions on how to perform sexual acts I’d never heard of, most of which seem anatomically impossible. That to me is very scary.
Certain matters belong at home and in the churches. Federal law forbids the federal government from getting involved in curriculum in any way. Maybe the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools won’t promote (and fund) the GLSEN agenda Jennings created. I don’t know.
But I do know that many longstanding tenets of religion are under fire from the Obama White House.
By invoking God in the speech, the president argued for freedom of religion as a principal right of all Americans. And part of that, Mr. President, is the right of Americans to be free of government-funded programs that counter their religious beliefs.
God bless America.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)
