The ACLU: Enemy of America and Christianity
Rabbi Aryeh Spero
Human Events
7/20/07EXCERPT:
For the past forty years the ACLU has used every legal machination to make the display of Christmas trees illegal if placed in a public institution or on property where there is even the remotest connection to a tax dollar. They’ve bludgeoned America with their claim that such displays violate the separation of church and state. The display of the Ten Commandments? Illegal, they say. Prayer in school? Prohibited, they charge. The mere mention of God at a graduation ceremony --- grounds for a law suit. The display of a Menorah -- the next morning the ACLU is at the court steps already litigating.
How strict are they in their interpretation of separation of church and state? In Pittsburgh they went so far as to demand that a municipal parking lot be off limits to those parking there to visit a local Christmas display at a nearby church.
So when the University of Michigan decided to fund $25,000 worth of ritual foot-washers for Islamic students wishing to pray, one assumed the ACLU would yell foul. After all, it is a public institution, receiving federal and state taxes and using that money for a religious device whose purpose is to facilitate prayer. Not only did the ACLU not object but it also supported the expenditure as “reasonable,” something it can never bring itself to say when activities are for Judeo-Christian expression or symbols.
The Byron Union school district in California has decided that its public schools should set aside days and assignments where all students choose a Muslim name, recite passages from the Koran, and periodically give up certain comforts as “forms of fasting” that correspond to Ramadan. Has the ACLU brought this school district to court as it has hundreds of times when schools simply mention something involving Christianity or when a student reads her own Bible on her own time at recess or when a student chooses a religious theme for an essay topic? The ACLU has been silent. To the ACLU, the non-invasive, mere presence of anything Christian in school is far more “dangerous” than the actual, coerced undertaking of Islamic religious activities and beliefs in America's public schools.