Dear Editor,
Just a few weeks ago, I penned an article entitled “Silent No More.” Americans have allowed certain forces in society to turn our country into a vile, vulgar, violent, decadent, depraved society. What happened to the time-honored, tradition American values of hard work, discipline, personal responsibility, honesty, respect and charity? We have gone from Charlie Brown to Charlie Sheen. We have gone from Bing Crosby to vile, vulgar gangsta rap. Schools have been turned from learning zones into crime zones. How prophetic that article turned out. The very next day there was a school shooting in Kentucky. And just this week on Feb. 14 there was another tragic school shooting in Florida.
As could be expected, in the wake of the Florida school shooting, the airwaves were inundated with self-righteous people, feigning indignation, waving their finger at everything under the sun, blaming the youth, guns, etc., calling for more police in the schools, etc.. Time will go on, nothing will change, and people will forget, until the next school shooting!
A wise medical practitioner will distinguish between symptoms and causes in treating an illness. And anyone who remembers what the ’50s were like in America, when stores closed on Sunday and people respected one another, will attest to the fact that America is one sick society. People see the symptoms all around them, but what happened? What happened between then and now?
What happened was our values declined. They did not just decline though, they were scorned. In the ’60s, prayer and the Bible in our schools were attacked and removed, removing God’s blessings and, importantly, His protection. Test scores began to plummet, discipline fell apart. Condoms were passed out, but not the Word of God. Students at one south-side Chicago school even cuss out their principal.
For roughly 240 years the “New England Primer,” loaded with Bible verses, served our schools well. Students were blessed. John Adams, the voice of the Declaration of Independence, could read Greek and Latin as a teenager. Right Values equals Right Results. It was Benjamin Rush who predicted, if we were to remove the Bible from public schools we would be wasting so much time punishing crimes and taking so little pains to prevent them.
Society cannot remove Godly values from society and expect that society to thrive anymore than removing the spirit from man and expecting him to thrive. Again, it was Benjamin Rush who stated, “The only foundation for ... a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.” Our founders understood the correlation between God, morals, Godly values and success in government and society.
Now some of the very people who are responsible for the cold-blooded killing of millions of babies are now going to lecture us on what evil is?! God forbid! Lift the ban on God in schools. Arm teachers and students with the Word of God. Let students pray at school, at sporting events, and at commencement exercises, and then maybe people won’t have to pray afterwards for the families of the dead students being carried out of the schools. Should not our students be allowed their First Amendment rights ?
This attack on America’s Godly foundations must stop. As Carman sang years ago, “We want God in America again.” This is, after all, “One nation under God.”

Paul Leonard
Great Bend