Bill Would Force-Feed Freedom

In case you haven’t heard, there is no religious freedom in America - but the religious right, thank heaven, is riding to the rescue.

The Christian Coalition - armed with the blessings of both Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole - is now pushing hard for a Religious Equality Amendment to the Constitution.

Our preacher politicians will make sure that anyone who wants to express religious sentiments in a public forum can do so without fear that some hostile court might blow the whistle, invoking some picky principle about the separation of church and state.

For those who just can’t wait for Congress to finish rewriting the Bill of Rights and want a preview of how the Religious Equality Amendment would work, there’s a test case playing out right now in Utah.

Last month, a choral teacher at West High School, a public school in Salt Lake City, chose two Christian songs for his choir to perform at graduation - but was stopped by a federal court, which insisted that secular anthems be sung instead.

Most students and parents were furious; the class valedictorian likened the court’s repression to that of China’s Tiananmen Square. If only the Religious Equality Amendment were in place, the choir could have sung just what it wanted, and how much happier the graduation would have been!

Except for Rachel Bauchman. It was Miss Bauchman, 16, who took the issue to court in the first place.

Rachel did not feel, as a Jew, that she should be coerced into performing Christian songs in a choral class taken for credit.

“No child should feel like a second-class citizen in their own choir,” she maintained in a phone conversation from her home. “I was left out, I was laughed at, I was whispered about.”

And once the school refused to budge, prompting her suit, she found swastikas scrawled on her campaign posters for junior class office.

Rachel belongs to the National Honor Society and the student senate; she loves music; she would have no objection to singing classical religious music, like Handel’s “Messiah.”

But she draws the line at a song like “Friends,” a 1982 Christian pop hit whose appeal is devotional, not musical. Then again, she wouldn’t want to sing religious Jewish songs at graduation either; she feels that at a public school where different faiths are represented, no religion should be given official prominence, lest any child feel left out.

Many of her Christian friends and neighbors agree. “It is a shame to see the once-minority Mormons inflict the same persecutions that they once fled from,” wrote one eloquent Mormon neighbor to The Salt Lake Tribune.

For weeks, the local press has been debating the story, which reached an ugly crescendo once graduation actually arrived.

After the choir sang the two substitute songs, a student led the assembled in “Friends” anyway - defying the court order. On videotape, you can see some school officials sitting passively on stage, tacitly condoning a high school assembly’s disintegration into what one observer called “a hooting mob.”

The religious right and its supporters have already seized upon the kids and parents who sang “Friends” as heroes - poster-perfect examples of why a Religious Equality Amendment is so desperately needed.

Rep. Ernest Jim Istook Jr., R-Okla., who is point man for this crusade in the House, has defended the amendment against critics by explaining that “nobody is proposing that we return to a practice of compulsory prayer, or mandatory recital or reading from scripture.”

And he’s right. Rachel was given the option of sitting out her choir class when it rehearsed Christian songs and receiving an automatic “A”; she wasn’t forced to do anything.

But once everyone around her started singing “Friends,” Rachel did flee the graduation. “I felt extremely horrible,” she explained. “And sad and hurt that I couldn’t perform with my choir and say goodbye to friends.”

But, hey, she’s just one person, and why should one person’s hurt feelings stand in the way of the majority declaring its faith in public?

Under the Religious Equality Amendment that majority’s beliefs will at last be firmly protected, and a loner like Rachel Bauchman will not be able to destroy the religious freedom of God-loving Americans everywhere by crying to the courts about her civil rights.

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