November/December 2003

This morning I unpacked my latest cell phone and tried to turn it on. And tried and tried. To no avail! I pushed every likely button in hopes of getting power up. I even read the summary sheet for start-up. It was cryptic and unhelpful. Finally I called the 800 help line, and a velvet-voiced woman on the other end took me step-by-step through the empowerment process. She never once said, “Why didn’t you read the instruction manual?”

I am greatly dismayed that your response to Mr. Gary Jenson’s letter to the editor in the May/June 2002 issue was so restrained and vague. “Rough logic”? Mr. Jenson’s logic was fine; it was his suppositions or assumptions that drove his logic that were dangerously flawed. His suggestion that our internment of United States citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps was a benevolent and necessary act to “protect” them from the other citizens is absurd!

Depending on whom you ask, Gurbaj Singh is either a victim of religious intolerance or a troublemaker defying his provincial government, school board, and school. In 2001 the then-12-year-old Sikh from Montreal made headlines when he knocked heads with his school, Sainte-Catherine-Laboure, over his wearing a four-inch (10-centimeter) ceremonial dagger, known officially as a kirpan.

In the case of Newdow v. U.S. Congress the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Congress violated the First Amendment to the Constitution when it added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. The Newdow ruling was as controversial as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, when the High Court found an unwritten right to abortion buried in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was as controversial as the Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that made “separate but equal” the law of the land.

Sunday laws have been a part of the legal landscape of America from the time of European settlement. Nevertheless, because Sunday laws are not generally at the forefront of today’s legislative debates and, as currently enforced, create only occasional serious difficulties, their pervasive presence is ignored. However, these laws should be neither dismissed nor treated lightly. Sunday laws are religious in origin and purpose, and they create a burden on the religious practices of those whose faith dictates that they rest on a day other than Sunday.

A few years ago a friend of mine paid my way to a family camp sponsored by the American Heritage Party of Washington State. The AHP was a Washington State chapter of the Constitution Party before leaving several years ago and changing its name to the AHP.

Woven into the warp and woof of American culture—a good swath of it, anyway—is the notion of athletics and fair play. For decades school sports have helped lift young people from obscurity into the limelight (Ronald Reagan, Brandi Chastain). And in some parts of the country—most notably Texas—football games all but take on the aura of an actual religious event.

In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Pickering v. Board of Education that public school teachers do not forfeit their First Amendment rights to engage in speech that their employer, the school district, might find disagreeable.¹ The following year, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the High Court wrote that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”²