Columns

Let's hear three jeers for the no-godniks

JOE KLOCK
Published: December 13, 2012

Regular readers (bless their masochistic hearts) will recognize echoes of our 2009 rant on the subject du jour, which had the same relative impact on its targets as previously had Prohibition on the boys in the back room and the Seventh Commandment on the girls upstairs.

In August 2009, we reported that two high school faculty members in my home state of Florida were awaiting trial and facing possible imprisonment for participating in a prayer before breaking bread at a small meeting on school premises.

The whistle blowers were a few ACLUnatics who had earlier brokered a deal specifically prohibiting prayer during school functions.

More recently, a threatened lawsuit by successors to that Gang Of Grinches put a halt to what had become a Christmas tradition for members of the Moanalua High School Orchestra in Honolulu.

For the preceding six years, that award-winning group, with the help of volunteers from the local New Hope Church had raised more than $200,000 for a charity that benefits poor people in Africa.

But that all came to a halt when the local Department of Education decided, under pressure, to cancel the concert just four days before the event was to take place.

Seems that the Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, objected to the involvement of the New Hope folks, who handled ticket sales and sold those tickets at their services.

Said the pressuring complainants: "The issue here is an entanglement between a public school and a Christian church; and one of the things about the constitution is that it prohibits the involvement of public schools and churches."

This had to be a tough sell to the musicians who were thus prevented from performing and to the volunteer sponsors of this year's event who had already sold more than 600 tickets and would have generated about $30,000 in sales and donations.

It would be an even tougher sale to those deprived beneficiaries in Africa. (The flip side of Aloha?)

We shall not here probe the minutiae of these specific cases, except to observe that they spotlight a continuing campaign to dismantle what we believe to be one of the true intents of our Founding Fathers - recognizing God, but doing so without establishing an official State religion.

As presently being promulgated by a militant minority of Antigodniks, separation of church and state is a hybridized interpretation of our First Amendment, in which mutation/mutilation it is taken to mean separation of God (rather than church) and state.

This would no more accurately reflect the mindsets of our Foredads than importing the Church of England as our official denomination.

Consider the exact wording of that Amendment, which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

If that was intended to exclude recognition of a higher power, it was belied by the fact that all signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were affiliated with an established church in the colonies.

Many of them held degrees in theology, hardly qualifying their group as a hotbed of Atheism.

Aside: I find it curious, if not ludicrous, that rabid secularists get their skivvies and panties in a bunch over a deity which, according to them, doesn't even exist.

Second aside: Genuine Geezers will recall Tex Beneke's rendition of a hit song, entitled "The Little Man Who Wasn't There," accompanied by the Glenn Miller orchestra.

Further noteworthy items:

Moreover, when the nine Justices enter that hallowed chamber for their deliberations, a U.S. Marshal solemnly chants, "God save the United States and this Honorable Court."

God save us, indeed, if we continue to allow the eager beavers of secularism to dam up the flow of godliness on which our nation was founded and on which it continues to depend for its strength and longevity.

God bless America? You can bet your sweet assets on that, folks, as did our Founding Fathers!

Freelance wordworker Joe Klock, Sr. ( ) winters in Key Largo and Coral Gables, Florida and summers in New Hampshire.