O Rare BHSD, and O Rare Constitution

The BHSD school board was ruminating, like a Patch blogger, about religion again last night.

O rare BHSD, that can still have such conversations.

Heady and surely sensitive stuff for public discussion: God, God's existence, secular humanism, silent prayer, constitutional law, and even the faith of our founding fathers (plug: David Holmes author of recent book by that name http://www.amazon.com/Faiths-Founding-Fathers-David-Holmes/dp/0195300920 is speaking at Wayne State University on October 2 on his recent work on the religion of postwar presidents http://www.amazon.com/Faiths-Postwar-Presidents-Religion-American/dp/0820338621/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&i... under the auspices of WSU's Religious Study Program).

I truly hope no one was offended or unduly upset by this kind of talk in public. Could sex be the next topic? I am pretty sure it won't be politics because that is just off the list.

The board was busy recasting its religious liberty policy in light of the still "recent" media kerfluffle over prayer and football, a story which rather remarkably has garnered more attention than the fact that the District's 10 year strategic plan (meeting Oct. 1 at East Hills) might  be in jeopardy because the District won't be here through the whole tens years to see through the plan!

Plenty of prayers then, I think, probably some wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the board seems to prefer to wait for the wake.

OK.

At any rate, BHSD administration did have a few necessarily awkward paragraphs in its new policy that brought out some interesting points.

At one section, for example, the policy describes the relationship of the first amendment to school "districts," saying, basically, school districts have to as best as possible provide both freedom of and freedom from religion just like other public entities.

But it was the yoking of the 1st amendment and the word "district" that caught my eye. I was not alone: When a board member noted this seeming anachronism, BHSD administration dutifully responded that the district's lawyer had crafted the language in accordance with precedent and case law and hadn't clumsily culled together the first amendment proper and the entities we know as school districts.

To paraphrase: I don't think the founding fathers were thinking of school districts when they were considering the first amendment.

Well....maybe...maybe not.

At about the same time the country was getting rolling and coming up with little things like the first amendment it was in fact thinking, too, of geographically defined school Districts. For folks like Adams and Jefferson those kinds of things went together in the way God, family and football go together for others.

Here is that notoriously obnoxious and disliked John Adams (1785):

"The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves."

Amen.