Many Democrats outside of West Virginia have an almost reverential attitude towards Robert Byrd. The elders statesman of the Senate has scored a lot of points in the past few years for standing up to Dubya and trying to reassert the power of the Senate in the country's affairs. What they largely miss (or ignore - I'm not sure which) is that on many more issues Bob is really a conservative - more of a John McCain than Russ Feingold. Which, unfortunately, leads him to do things like this:
For the eighth time in 43 years, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is proposing that Congress adopt a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary prayer in public schools and extracurricular activities.Byrd introduced the amendment today in the U.S. Senate.
'The importance of prayer is recognized by people of faith in nearly all of the world's religions,' Byrd said. 'Yet, in America, prayer is increasingly barred from public life.'
Ugh. I'm not sure what is worse - the amendment itself of Bob's mistaken view of current law:
'It seems to me that any prohibition of voluntary prayer in school violates the right of our school children to practice freely their religion,' Byrd said. 'And that's just not right. Any child should be free to pray to God, of his or her own volition, whether at home, in church or at school. Period.'Of course, no child (or any other person) is prohibited from praying in public. The only problem comes when the state gets involved and the atmosphere becomes coercive. But that doesn't sound as good during an election year.
1 comment:
I doubt that he really needs the clout for election purposes. The story that I read said that he has introduced this amendment numerous times (i.e. 1962, 1973, 1979, 1982, 1993, 1995 and 1997.) http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2006042744
Agreed, this Amendment does seem to be superfluous in light of the current law. However, it would seem that Bob believes: 1) that the Supreme Court, with its new Christ-certified appointees, is itching to outlaw prayer or 2) that we need a way to back door public displays of religion so that others can continue to force their views upon captive audiences. I don't know if he's thinking about either of these, but from his comments I could see either one being plausible.
Perhaps we'll have a need for schools to designate additional areas at stadiums such as the "laying hands-on" faith healers box, the "talking in tongues" cheering section, and the all important "snake handling endzone". I guess that we also have to make this non-demoninational so we might also need to have booster sections like "the Mecca Mollahs", the "the Zionist Zoo", and the "Opus Dei Defenders". Naturally, this separation will prevent anybody from being exposed to prayers that the don't want to hear and then everyone can finally be happy. The end.
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