Dept. Of Clarifications

A couple of items of business. First, it seems that a number of people were confused by my little attempt at satirizing Ayn Rand. Rather than kill the joke, such as it is, by explaining who Ms. Rand was and what she stood for, I'll instead link to the famous Whittaker Chambers' review of her most famous novel Atlas Shrugged (appropriately titled "Big Sister is Watching You"). There are a number of contenders for the title of worst writer who ever lived, but I think the erstwhile Ms. Alice Rosenbaum takes the prize. Her "philosophy," a hopeless mess of unsupportable assertion, rudimentary fallacy, caricaturish hyper-rationalism, and above all, bullying, has established itself as a bonafide cult for teenagers who don't fit in but think themselves superior to their peers. Her attempts at fiction writing range from unbearably awful to simply unreadable. Uh, I guess I'll leave it at that.

Second, a few days ago Rob Spiro asked me to elaborate on a throwaway comment in this post. He wrote:

You tangentially talked about school prayer in this post, and I'd be interested to hear more about your thoughts... why is "prayer time" in public schools necessarily sectarian?

I didn't mean to give this question short shrift, because it points to a bit of carelessness on my part. At the time I wrote that post, all I had in mind when I talked about "public school prayer" was a period in the day when someone (maybe a student) would recite a prayer and other students could participate or not as they saw fit. But of course, school prayer advocacy includes proposals for setting aside some kind of quiet "prayer time," the use of which is left up to students' discretion. In fact, this proposal might be the more common, as it's clearly an effort to appease the courts that have consistently rejected overt school prayer (unfortunately for the advocates, "prayer time" has been consistently rejected as well).

So what's so bad about "prayer time"? Two things: 1) This is a point I've made before in a slightly different context, but state endorsement of all religions simultaneously is not on stronger ground Constitutionally than state endorsement of one religion. 2) In practice, of course, "prayer time" always becomes "Christian prayer time." That's actually the reason the courts cite for not signing onto it.

And these two difficulties are going to apply to any attempt, no matter how watered-down, to introduce prayer into public schools. Firstly, the government is prohibited from endorsing any form of religious dogma, including pan-religious dogma. Secondly, I don't think there's any possibility for implementation of such policy that doesn't slide away from pan-religiosity into some sectarian mode. Lastly, consider the effect of a non-specific prayer time on a heterogeneous public school. Nothing is going to do more to foster animosities than the addition of competing religious doctrines to the classroom. Try, also, being a little atheist in such a setting. I imagine it would be pretty scarring.