-By Warner Todd Huston
A group called Liberty Counsel is suing Florida’s Collier County Schools for banning Bibles from being distributed on its campuses even after allowing the practice for years. The organization World Changers has been distributing Bibles to students during off-school hours on the day closest to national Religious Freedom Day — held on January 16 — for some time. Yet now school district officials have declared that the Bible holds no “educational benefit” to students. (download .pdf of complaint here)
The Collier County School District policy specifically allows the distribution of literature by nonprofit organizations, but only with the approval of the superintendent and the Community Request Committee, whose members are appointed by the superintendent. Approval was denied to World Changers, despite the fact that its distribution included a disclaimer of any school endorsement or sponsorship and that receiving a Bible was purely voluntary. The district, nevertheless, censored World Changers’ message simply because it included the Bible.
Liberty Counsel founder Matthew D. Staver said in a press release, “…we are compelled to sue to protect the right simply to make free Bibles available to students in public schools. Many of our founding fathers were taught to read using the Bible. If it had no educational value, then many of them would have been illiterate. The distribution of religious literature in a forum opened for secular literature is constitutionally protected.”
And this is just the point, isn’t it? Whether you believe that the Christian Bible is the Word of God, whether you believe in the Christian religion itself, no matter how you feel about any religion, to say that The Bible holds no “educational benefit” to students is an ignorant statement. Much of Western history has been influenced by the Bible and even if that weren’t true — which it is — the founding of the United States is thoroughly infused with the Bible (also another truth the left does not want to hear). From George Washington’s constant overtures to Divine Providence, to the Declaration of Independence, to many of our early proclamations and famous speeches, the influence of Christianity and its God is felt. To understand much of our history is to find the influence of the Bible and the Christian doctrines that it spawned.
To say that the Bible holds no educational benefit to American students is to teach a warped and incomplete history to those very students. Unfortunately, this is the empty, fallacious form of education in which our fetid schools are wallowing.
And to ban the distribution of Bibles on Religious Freedom day is an apostasy to the American way that amazes for the obvious blindness evinced by the book banners in the Collier County School District. These people should be ashamed of themselves for their ignorance. So much for that crazy old American idea of religious freedom!
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.