Religious Right Attacks Textbooks : Civil Libertarians Aid Defense in Secular Humanism Suit

When Judith Whorton read an article on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her son’s eighth-grade civics textbook earlier this year, she was appalled by what she says was left out of the story.

“It made no mention of the fact that Martin Luther King was a reverend or a pastor and said nothing about the part black churches and many white evangelical churches played in the civil rights movement,” she said.

To Whorton, and to more than 600 other parents, teachers, ministers and others who have joined as plaintiffs in a controversial federal court case here, the omission of those “vital facts” in her son’s textbooks is just another sign of what they see as the pervasive and perfidious influence of so-called secular humanism in public school textbooks.

The case, which opened Monday in federal district court here, pits the religious right against national civil libertarian lobbies. The plaintiffs argue that, if references to Christianity are excluded from public school texts, then so must be references to secular humanism, which they define as an atheistic religion that makes man, not God, the center of the universe and advocates situational ethics and morals instead of absolute values.

They have compiled a list of 46 textbooks that they contend promote secular humanism, out of the more than 4,000 in use in Alabama schools. Among other things, the plaintiffs charge that passages in these books about one-parent families and divorce offend their beliefs about traditional families.

They also object to sentences such as “People date to have fun” and “Accept yourself and how you are. Once you feel good about yourself, you can accept and value others.” Such passages conflict with their beliefs that dating is a prelude to holy matrimony and that “accepting yourself” can exclude a role for Jesus.

Anthony Podesta, president of People for the American Way, which is helping in the fight against the suit, contends that the plaintiffs are using secular humanism as a catchall term for any school course, textbook or teaching method that does not conform to their fundamentalist religious beliefs.

“The victory they want will make all their beliefs the standard that all textbooks and all curricula in the public schools must follow,” he said at a news conference before the trial opened. “What they want is to inject their theology into biology classes and the rest of the curriculum as well.”

Attack Elsewhere

Podesta said that, if the plaintiffs are successful in Alabama, it will give the religious right the legal ammunition it needs to escalate its attack on public education in communities across the country.

One such attack already under way, supporters of the defendants say, is a trial in Tennessee in which a band of Christian fundamentalist parents from Church Hill charged that the local public school textbooks were “anti-Christian and anti-American” and that alternative readers conforming to their strict religious beliefs should be issued to their children. A decision is expected in about a month.

People for the American Way, which was founded by television producer Norman Lear in 1980 to counter the religious right, has joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to provide legal counsel and funding for 12 parents who have entered the case as “intervenors” on the side of the defendant, the Alabama state board of education.

Similar help with legal counsel and funding is being provided to the plaintiffs by the National Legal Foundation, a fundamentalist Christian group founded by Pat Robertson, a television evangelist and potential presidential candidate.

The case stems from a 1981 lawsuit filed by Ismael Jaffree, a Mobile attorney and avowed agnostic, that successfully challenged an Alabama law permitting a moment of silence or voluntary prayer before school began.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1983, U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand, who had earlier upheld the law, exercised a right he had reserved to himself in a footnote in his original decision to look into the question of whether other forms of religion were being promoted in public school curricula.

He then realigned the case, making plaintiffs of the 624 parents and others who had originally intervened to defend the school prayer laws, and making defendants of the original plaintiffs.

Gov. George C. Wallace and the Mobile County school board were among the new defendants. But both signed consent decrees that, in essence, said that they agreed that secular humanism is being taught in public schools. The state school board, however, did not.

In opening the new non-jury trial Monday, Hand said the central issue is whether “a religion (of secular humanism) is being taught” and admonished both sides in the dispute that, if they failed to adequately discuss the issues, the court would be forced to call its own witnesses.

If the plaintiffs are successful, the federal courts in Alabama would be given the right to review all textbooks used in public schools to ensure that secular humanism is not promoted in the books.