Readers debate fifth period worship.

Dahlia Lithwick's examination of Staunton, Virginia's Weekday Religious Education program generates some incisive conversation.

BenK's opening shot, titled "Again, the Secularist blind spot," is notable not just for its suggestion that secularism is as creedal as the next faith, but for the bevy of responses from Jurisfraysters.

[Fray Editor should probably disclaim that he attended a religious primary school, an experience that required him and his classmates to don yarmulkes on field trips to wander the notable Confederate attractions in the Atlanta area while the kids from the Brimstone Pentecostal Academy of Gwinnett County, mouths agape, inspected for little pointy tails emanating from our parachute pants.]

BenK writes:

Once again the ideal that seems to be hard to find but everybody ought to somehow be searching for is, according to Lithwick, some "secular source of moral instruction."

That's great to her, because... she is a secularist.

But just as Christianity appears all inclusive to those community members, secularism seems religiously neutral, obviously true, and all inclusive to Lithwick (and quite a few of the modern 'church or state' advocates). They are in fact advancing a religion under the guise of no religion.

This is naturally blatant persecution of other religions, to discount them as compared to secularism. What may not be possible is to eliminate the idea of a single dominant religion from our society. And that will leave us with a choice between the various options, including secularism.

However, if we need to make that choice, we shouldn't make it by default…

Is Lithwick's countryman, Neil Peart of Rush, correct in singing, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"?  Joe_JP, here,and Thrasymachus don't think so. T answers:

Newsflash: most Americans don't actually want to see religion clothed in the authority of the State. Labeling that principle "Secularism" and then discounting it as yet another "religion", no more deserving of "preference" than Christianity or Judaism (to name the only two tolerated examples) is both intellectually and theologically obtuse.

It's actually kind of amusing that, when moral relativism's chickens truly and finally came home to roost, it was the Christian Fundamentalists who ended up embracing it the most.

BenK cracks back:

[Secularism] it has dogmatic beliefs about things like human anthropology, the origin of rituals and behaviors ... it also comes with rituals and important professions and sources of authority. It is tied up with and preoccupied by science, although the sciences are not themselves tied to it.

In the same thread, JRudkis maintains:

The First Amendment was only applied to the Federal Government until the early 1900's (when the 14th amendment incorporated the first against the states). Massachusetts had an official religion until 1830ish, indicating to me that the original intent was to allow the states to apply religion as they saw fit.

ClaudeScales reads a very invidious subtext into the cry of "states rights." To BenK and others he responds:

I spent much of my childhood and youth in parts of Florida that were then, unlike Miami and environs, very much socially and politically part of the South. These years (1954-67) coincided with the most intense period of the civil rights struggle. During that time, "states rights" was the battle cry of those who wished to perpetuate the evil system of racial segregation then prevalent in that region. That's why I have a bit of a problem seeing "states' rights" as a bulwark of protection for minorities.

I've read enough of your posts to understand the ugly vision you advocate: let whatever group is dominant in a particular locality do what it will to make life uncomfortable for those it seeks to exclude, and let the hapless losers "vote with their feet." This is not the nation I want to call home.

Perhaps you will argue that human nature is just too crabbed and nasty to try to impose minimal standards of toleration on it. I know that hate can't be legislated away, but I do think there should be national standards imposing limits on hateful conduct and prohibiting wrongful discrimination.

All this a little too austere for you? Read diggydawg's prescription here.

One frayster, AllanM, is an actual graduate of Staunton's WRE program:

As kids, none of us knew that WRE wasn't a school activity. When the teacher told us it was time for "Bible school", we all got up and went. It was like going to lunch, or to recess, or to an assembly. Bible School was in a small building which I now realize was a trailer, and which I heard years later was technically not on school property, but these differences were too subtle for us as kids. Flying over the elementary school in a helicopter, you'd assume that the small outbuilding was part of the school compound. Inside, it had desks and a blackboard, just like our other classroom.

…This morning, when I called my father to mention the article, he told me that he had urged me not to attend, telling me about the First Amendment. I have no memory of this - I would have been in first or second grade. Apparently, I sat by myself in the classroom for the first class of Bible School, and came home insisting that my parents let me do it, Constitution or no.

The lessons of Bible School were fairly milquetoast - a tepid complement to what I got every weekend in Sunday School and Church. But even if they were "noncoercive" and "non-state" to the parents, the School Board, and the community, they were just a part of school to us as kids. If the kids think Bible is another subject, like Math and Social Studies, does it really matter how administrative duties are divided, or where the money comes from?

For a more nuanced discussion of constitutional issues, check out the back-and-forth thread between JF mavens HLS2003 and JohnLex7 that begins here. In essence, HLS posits that the WRE case is less a debate about the establishment of religion than a distinction between "textualism" and "living rights" … KA 10:40 a.m.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Workers' Playtime: A slave to the trappings of urban bachelorhood, Fray Editor prefers the indicting, unsentimental Billy Bragg interpretation on this farkakte holiday, but will gladly surrender Fraywatch to the whims of the Fray's more romantic sorts. In Poems Fray, martingreene got things kicked off with this thread, a compilation of Valentine's Day poems, both "original or not," including works by Iris-2 and RyckNelson, among many others. And Ted_Burke dedicates a trio of original poems to some of the  Fray's leading ladies.  

Over in BOTF, DawnCoyote offers up this confessional:

I've got a crush on you…in a non-specific, generalized sort of way.

It's a Fray-crush.

I come here often, looking for you. When I find you here, my pulse kicks, my breath comes shallow and quick, my pupils dilate. I reach out to stroke the shiny black keys of my keyboard, to connect, and, ohhh…

Any guesses, BOTFers?

Thar She Blows: In case you missed the initial release, Universal has released a documentary, Inside Deep Throat, paying homage to the making of and the fallout from the 1972 porn classic. Answering Laura Kipnis' notion that the film was a "deeply absurdist" fantasy — albeit a "good-natured" one "in which male and female bodies and desires correspond with one another far better than they do back here on terra firma.  Splendid_IREny takes issue:

… Kipnis' attempt to assess the film as offering a perfect world solution to excuse the majority of men from learning the difference between the vagina and clitoris is intellectually vapid.

Healthy sexuality has nothing to do with the images in pornography. Even in terms of the male's orgasm, the "money" shot is nothing more than the ubiquitous explosion of action films. We know it's a joke and we've learned to expect the joke.

The joke of pornography, however, isn't the bad story, the bad acting or the bad attempts to make implausible seem plausible, i.e. Deep Throat. It's that pornography is not about sex. For all the myriad combinations of sexual entries, we may as well be watching circus freaks performing triple lutzes on an ice rink. Pornography is a means of satisfying boredom, of performing rote physical acts…

I hate to rain on the nostalgia parade, but women only getting orgasms from giving oral sex is nearly as absurd as men only gaining orgasms from giving cunnilingus all night.

The theatrics don't really botherCaptainRonVoyage: