LITTLE ROCK — If religion is important to you, then the last thing you want is for someone to get taxpayer money to impose his religious views on preschool children.
If religion is important to you, then you know that its lessons are best taught in your chosen worship service and in the example set by the life you lead.
That is nothing personal against state Rep. Justin Harris or his Growing God’s Kingdom day-care center in West Fork. That he is a Tea Partyinclined Republican is not the point.
Well, actually, it is part of the point, only to the extent that an observation of mine is accurate.
That observation is that Tea Partyinclined Republicans overlap in great measure with fundamentalist Christian conservatives and therefore are more inclined than most to try to impose their religion on government.
They also tend toward the hypocritical side by decrying big government for others while gulping from its trough for themselves.
You should not trust anybody, even yourself, to teach religion to hostage little ones in public settings with public dollars.
That is precisely why our wise Founders put the Establishment Clause in the Constitution. It means the government may not impose religion on the populace.
But you run into these modernday preachy peacocks who say God trumps the Founders. They believe the Lord commands them to infiltrate the government to impose what they call a Christian nation, but what is merely their own narrow version of one.
The Americans United for Separation of Church and State has chosen to make an issue of Harris’ reported religious teaching at a facility receiving grants from the state’s Arkansas Better Chance program for early childhood programs.
So now state government—everreactive and much too late—is doing spot checks and pondering new regulations beyond a passive admonishment not to be overtly religious.
A field worker for the state Department of Human Services who visited Harris’ center on Friday found bulletin-board material pledging allegiance to the “Christian flag.”
The inspector also reported picking up the sweet refrains of children on the playground singing that Jesus loved them. Maybe that was spontaneous. That’s the only way it would be constitutional.
Harris explains that parents are fully entitled to sign a waiver exempting their children from the daily religious sessions. That makes it legal, he says.
And, he says, the cost of the Bible instruction is separated from the publicly financed portions of his operation. But there are at least two basic problems.
One is that a parent is forced to make an alien spectacle of an impressionable young child in order to opt out. The other is that you can’t separate income in that way—taking taxpayer money in one hand and asserting that the money belongs only to that hand rather than the whole person.
How would a parent opt his child out of glimpsing a bulletin board or hearing a song on the playground?
The state Human Services Department needs to rein in this kind of thing. If it doesn’t, then I’m going to blame an Episcopalian by the name of Gov. Mike Beebe.
It’s simple. The state would decree that taking money from the taxpayer pot for public programs makes you ineligible to devote time with enrollees—or devote any of your resources—to religious subjects, even, say, Samson and Delilah.
You’re wondering what’s wrong with Samson and Delilah.
The answer is nothing, except I view it as an allegory, as literature with a moral, and you view it as a real guy with a bad-hair day. So we’re in trouble already, and innocent little kids are in the middle.
I sense an emerging middle ground, one I’m not altogether keen on: The Better Chance Program provides state money for 7 1/2 hours a day.
Harris may well end up being told to discontinue religious activity in the middle of that reimbursed period and to reserve daily Bible homilies for purely voluntary participation after the 7 1/2-hour period has ended.
That could amount to a distinction without a difference by which a child remains effectively hostage simply because his mother hasn’t gotten off work yet.
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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 11/10/2011