On Thursday, Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that establishes “Celebrate Freedom Week” during the week of Sept. 17 and requires schools to teach students about the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence in grades K-8 each year during that week. (Sept. 17, 1787, is the date the U.S. Constitution was adopted in Philadelphia.)
It seems harmless enough, and perhaps even beneficial, but it’s kind of ironic that a bill with “freedom” in its name would issue an unfunded mandate for schools, as was noted by Rep. Don Hineman, R-Dighton.

Delete-Merge UpWe also have to wonder why this bill, patterned after the original Celebrate Freedom Week bill in Texas, sounds so evangelestic when it intones, "The religious references in the writings of the founding fathers shall not be censored when presented as part of such instruction.” Are they being censored now?

Testifying against the law during hearings on the bill was Micheline Burger from the MainStream Coalition, which promotes the separation of church and state. She noted, “If the point of the bill ... is to promote religion in the public schools, then we have a very serious problem. The bill was created by Rick Green, a Conservative Christian from Texas who hosts a talk radio show that promotes his sectarian brand of Conservative Christianity. He also promotes and sells to schools a line of books and materials, including ‘The Founders Bible,’ that present erroneous information about U.S. history and government, including the false notion that the U.S. is a ‘Christian nation’ and that the Constitution is ‘Bible-based.’”

We don’t need to turn History class into an extended Sunday School class. The United States has established no religion, as was pointed out in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797.
President Barack Obama said, “One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population — we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.” These are not the words of someone who rejects faith in God, by the way. Obama also acknowledged that Americans are, by and large, a religious people, and said, “I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the role of faith in people’s lives, in the lives of the American people.”

We’ll trust our teachers to implement the new law, but we have to wonder what the lawmakers had in mind.