Prayer Banished by Adulterous Atheist

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” is a line from The Mourning Bride, a play written by English playwright, William Congreve. Unfortunately, that line is also the basis for driving prayer out of public schools.

It was a woman who was responsible for the lawsuit that ultimately removed Bible readings from public schools. Unlike the little old woman who sued over hot coffee, money was not her ulterior motive. Revenge against a man, however, was.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a self-avowed atheist, filed a lawsuit that snowballed into the decline of morals and values running rampant in our public schools today. She filed this suit to demand retribution from a married man, a Roman Catholic married man, who refused to divorce his wife to marry Madalyn. He did not refuse to divorce his wife because he was a moral man; after all, he was an adulterer. He refused because it was against his religion.

My belief is that Madalyn, blinded by rage against the Catholics, decided to sue her son’s school district to drive prayer out of schools forever. She succeeded, and at this point, I would normally say…”and the rest is history”, but what Ms. O’Hair accomplished requires a more detailed explanation.

The Supreme Court ruled in Madalyn O’ Hair’s favor and this ruling duped parents of children in public school into believing the ruling was just because schools violated the separation of church and state amendment.
Little did anyone know at the time, that O’Hair’s lawsuit, combined with the Abington School District’s lawsuit resulting in banning public school prayer, would be indirectly responsible for the escalating violence among students today. If you do not know, students attending Abington High School bashed 16-year-old Eddie Polec’s head in with baseball bats, back in November of 1994. The courts sentenced the worst of that bunch to a mere eighteen months in jail.

Since the Supreme Court ruled ‘prayer in school unconstitutional’ in 1963, America witnessed the assassinations of three great leaders, John and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Violent protests of the Vietnam War escalated as the decade of the 1960’s came to the close. Men burned their draft cards; women burned their bras. Kids dropped out of school and went on drugs.

The people who grew up during that decade, who believed that if the Supreme Court ruled prayer unconstitutional it has to be right, raised children to believe that religion and school did not mix.

This misconception led to a more generalized notion that prayer was no good, period, and parents handed down this ideal to their children, as well. These children witnessed the massacres at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Many students, who escaped the slaughter, told how they hid and prayed the gunmen would not find them. (Surprisingly enough, Michael Moore did not relay this information in his mock-u-mentary about Columbine.)

Those of us who believe in God and the power of prayer, recognize that if the courts had not banned prayer in schools, these tragedies may not have happened in the first place. Moreover, those of us who attended public school know that prayer could only help the train wrecks our public schools have become in America.

One school in Philadelphia, PA, fifteen minutes from the Abington High School, built a cement wall down the middle of the school, hoping to cut down on the violence between the students. This particular high school went through twenty principals in two years because of the violence. In addition, the wall did not help.

Therefore, I suggest that instead of cement walls, we build walls between ourselves, and between those trying to wipe out God altogether, and begin praying in school again.