Freedom of religion

Religion or the lack of religion belongs in the home and should be controlled by the parents. We are a multicultural country where everyone’s beliefs should be respected and no one’s beliefs forced on the unwilling.

When I was in grade school in the 1940s in a poor section of New York City, we had a school assembly every Tuesday and Thursday. During those meetings, the school principal (a Protestant) read from the King James version of the Bible and led the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer and various Protestant hymns, which few students were familiar with. The teachers were almost all Jewish, and the students were Catholics (Irish, Polish, Italian, Spanish, etc.), Jewish (some American born and some refugees fleeing Europe from the Nazis), Muslims, Buddhists and almost all the children of immigrants. A small percentage of students were black and probably Protestant, and some students had parents who were non-believers.

Then prayer was removed from the schools. But there is always some movement to restore it in some guise or other. There is nothing inherently harmful in handing out Bibles to students, but whose version? Does the Koran get equal time, or the Torah or the Book of Mormon? If prayer is to be said in the schools, whose prayer? Does every religion get equal representation?

Anyone who wishes to pray can do so at any time.

Freedom of religion does not refer to one particular religion. That’s what our forefathers had in mind. Jo King Presque Isle