Plus ca meme...
Jul. 30th, 2006 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThis (NYT, registration or BugMeNot probabaly required) piece of bullshit annoyed me, but didn't (in light of everything else in the world taking up bits and pieces of my mind) slipped past me.
As a quick summation the facts are these:
A family was run out of town, with threats of death, after years of low-grade harrassement and intimidation because some of them are Jewish.
It gets gussied up some, with people talking about community norms, tradition, the right to worship as they please and other claptrap, but it is, at core, a story of intolerance, and the myth of "freedom of, not from, religion."
Some excerpts, and then the commentary:
GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.
For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act....
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.
After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.
The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches....
More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group...
In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.
“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”
The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.
“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”
Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”
Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.
A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”
Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”
Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.
But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain."
Now, putting aside my personal political opinions, and merely going on my religious convictions, what the folks in that town are doing is wrong.
Deuteronomy 10:19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Ezekiel complained “Now, son of man, will you judge, will you judge the bloody city? Yes, show her all her abominations! Then say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “The city sheds blood in her own midst, that her time may come; and she makes idols within herself to defile herself. You have become guilty by the blood which you have shed, and have defiled yourself with the idols which you have made. You have caused your days to draw near, and have come to the end of your years; therefore I have made you a reproach to the nations, and a mockery to all countries. Those near and those far from you will mock you as infamous and full of tumult. “Look, the princes of Israel: each one has used his power to shed blood in you. In you they have made light of father and mother; in your midst they have oppressed the stranger;"
A couple of verses later, the same charge (mistreating of strangers) is made.
The entire story of Sodom is about the mistreatment of strangers.
And, the kicker (as these are those who profess themselves to be Christians),
When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
All of which is well and good. None of which touches on the non-religious aspects of this.
People say that prayer in schools, "under God," in the Pledge of Alliegience (which phrase I stopped including, somewhere around the 5th or 6th grade, when I was at a parish school, in the time when my first thought that I might be called to the priest was bubbling in my head) or other, "minor" requirements to profess some public participation in the dominant religion are, "harmless," are, to be blunt, full of shit.
These folks weren't merely (as if it's mere) asked to make a public proclamation of hypocrisy, they were run out of town. Their lives have been permanently, and perhaps irrevocably altered (note, the daughter has had, becuase of the monetary damage done to the family, had to drop out of school) because they weren't Christian.
Because they weren't Christian.
All they had to do, to avoid this was, accept that they were free to choose their personal religion, but not free from their neightbors.
There's a word, known more for it's length than it's usefulness, antidisestablishmentarianism. For those who don't know, it means one who is for keeping the Church of England as the State Church of England. There was a time when, without making windows into men's souls, one could believe anything one wanted, so long as one went to a CofE service every week, or paid a fine.
For those not possessed of great means, the fines were ruinous. The Dobriches, residents of the town for almost 40 years, the entire lives of the kids, failed to do the local equivalent, and they've been ruined. The Does, are afraid of the same treatment. That's what freedom of, not freedom from, means.
It means all the social power of peer pressure, of the anonymous call; supported by both the silence of the mass, and the vocal support of the few, of the brick through the window, the taunts in the street, the pain of not knowing who hates one; and so thinking every man's hand is against one, and every other hateful thing which is brought to bear against the other, is focused on those who aren't willing to pay lip service to the local gods.
It makes a mockery of that "freedom."
We, as thinking people, as tolerant people, as people who value actual; instead of rhetorical, freedom, shouldn't be willing to stand for it. We shouldn't be willing to allow our politicians to allow it. We certainly shouldn't allow Christians to go out and plead they are being persecuted; because no one allows them to force others to pray in schools, or spend the taxpayers' money to display their symbols, or hold up their prejudices up as the fountain of all morality.
That's not tolerance, that's kowtowing, and appeasement; it leads to things like this.
As a quick summation the facts are these:
A family was run out of town, with threats of death, after years of low-grade harrassement and intimidation because some of them are Jewish.
It gets gussied up some, with people talking about community norms, tradition, the right to worship as they please and other claptrap, but it is, at core, a story of intolerance, and the myth of "freedom of, not from, religion."
Some excerpts, and then the commentary:
GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.
For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act....
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.
After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.
The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches....
More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group...
In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.
“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”
The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.
“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”
Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”
Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.
A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”
Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”
Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.
But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain."
Now, putting aside my personal political opinions, and merely going on my religious convictions, what the folks in that town are doing is wrong.
Deuteronomy 10:19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Ezekiel complained “Now, son of man, will you judge, will you judge the bloody city? Yes, show her all her abominations! Then say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “The city sheds blood in her own midst, that her time may come; and she makes idols within herself to defile herself. You have become guilty by the blood which you have shed, and have defiled yourself with the idols which you have made. You have caused your days to draw near, and have come to the end of your years; therefore I have made you a reproach to the nations, and a mockery to all countries. Those near and those far from you will mock you as infamous and full of tumult. “Look, the princes of Israel: each one has used his power to shed blood in you. In you they have made light of father and mother; in your midst they have oppressed the stranger;"
A couple of verses later, the same charge (mistreating of strangers) is made.
The entire story of Sodom is about the mistreatment of strangers.
And, the kicker (as these are those who profess themselves to be Christians),
When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
All of which is well and good. None of which touches on the non-religious aspects of this.
People say that prayer in schools, "under God," in the Pledge of Alliegience (which phrase I stopped including, somewhere around the 5th or 6th grade, when I was at a parish school, in the time when my first thought that I might be called to the priest was bubbling in my head) or other, "minor" requirements to profess some public participation in the dominant religion are, "harmless," are, to be blunt, full of shit.
These folks weren't merely (as if it's mere) asked to make a public proclamation of hypocrisy, they were run out of town. Their lives have been permanently, and perhaps irrevocably altered (note, the daughter has had, becuase of the monetary damage done to the family, had to drop out of school) because they weren't Christian.
Because they weren't Christian.
All they had to do, to avoid this was, accept that they were free to choose their personal religion, but not free from their neightbors.
There's a word, known more for it's length than it's usefulness, antidisestablishmentarianism. For those who don't know, it means one who is for keeping the Church of England as the State Church of England. There was a time when, without making windows into men's souls, one could believe anything one wanted, so long as one went to a CofE service every week, or paid a fine.
For those not possessed of great means, the fines were ruinous. The Dobriches, residents of the town for almost 40 years, the entire lives of the kids, failed to do the local equivalent, and they've been ruined. The Does, are afraid of the same treatment. That's what freedom of, not freedom from, means.
It means all the social power of peer pressure, of the anonymous call; supported by both the silence of the mass, and the vocal support of the few, of the brick through the window, the taunts in the street, the pain of not knowing who hates one; and so thinking every man's hand is against one, and every other hateful thing which is brought to bear against the other, is focused on those who aren't willing to pay lip service to the local gods.
It makes a mockery of that "freedom."
We, as thinking people, as tolerant people, as people who value actual; instead of rhetorical, freedom, shouldn't be willing to stand for it. We shouldn't be willing to allow our politicians to allow it. We certainly shouldn't allow Christians to go out and plead they are being persecuted; because no one allows them to force others to pray in schools, or spend the taxpayers' money to display their symbols, or hold up their prejudices up as the fountain of all morality.
That's not tolerance, that's kowtowing, and appeasement; it leads to things like this.
