COURTS SHOULD NOT DEMAND TAX SUPPORTED PUBLIC SCHOOLS HONOR RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS
A week or so ago I responded by a letter to the editor to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. The article reported that an Islamic organization was going to sue the San Francisco school district to demand that they reinstate a discarded plan to schedule a school holiday for the religious holiday of Eid at the end of Ramadan.
I wrote:
“No religious group should force a public entity to declare a religious holiday by threat of a lawsuit.
The San Francisco school board should read the First Amendment (and the 14th). It prohibits passing a law, 'respecting establishment of religion.' Public schools, as tax-supported entities, should be secular."
The paper’s article had sharply reminded my of my discomfort, back in the sixth grade with a school activity singing a medley of Christmas songs, because my Jewish/skeptic soul simply could not let me voice phrases like “round yon virgin…holy infant”, “born is the king of Israel”, or about “to save us all from Satan’s power when we have gone astray”. This wasn’t stuff, or anyone in my family believed. They weren’t provable statements. And as concepts, I don’t think they’ve had a notably beneficial effect on the world.
Joe Scanlon, of Oakland responded with a letter to the editor a day later:
"Regarding “Public schools should be secular. Don’t force religious holidays on them” (Letters to the Editor, SF Chronicle.com, March 13): While I appreciate the sentiment behind Peter Liederman’s letter, which makes sense on the surface, what about Christmas? That’s a religious holiday if ever there was one.
I suppose he would like to see public schools declare December 25 to be a regular school day: And what about Christmas vacation? A lot of schools let kids out for a couple of weeks of vacation because of Christmas.
The same question applies to Ramadan. To be consistent, public schools should either cancel all Christmas-related holidays or declare the 10 days of Ramdan to be school holidays as well. Likewise, if public schools are going to have Christmas holidays, they should also allow seven days of holidays during Passover.
And there are a lot more religions that those three.”
To quibble, per Google, Ramadan lasts 29-30 days; Orthodox Catholicism (with its different calendar for holidays) is with Judaism, Taoism, and Islam four, not three, religions. And the winter break in most public schools runs approximately from the winter solstice till the first work day of the New Year. Also, there is a difference between having school holidays that includes someone’s religious holiday, and having school holidays that honor a particular religious holiday.
A third writer, Maw Choi, chimed in two days later:
“…I propose that we make all schools adopt a year-round calendar (some schools have this are [sic] already). There are many benefits to this.
Students will have more school days, and the district can accommodate all religious holidays without negatively affecting meeting curriculum standards. Teaching about the various holidays can serve as one of the academic goals that would enrich student understanding of culture and history.”
While a course on comparative cultural holidays may be useful in our more globalized world, learning about such things does not require actually taking off those days. Breaks at the changes of the seasons are good. Kids need to get out and stretch their legs and breath outside air. Liberal opportunities should be given for kids and families to whom religious practice is important to take leave from secular schedules.
Further, the two Christian holidays that are included during public schools Spring and Winter breaks are scarcely faith-based. Nobody much over age five believes in Santa Claus. Decorated trees, colored lights, and presents, and Coca-cola drinking Jolly St. Nick kissing mommy under the mistletoe, isn’t the sort of religion that brought about the Spanish Inquisition, the 30 years war, or the holocaust.
And as for Easter holiday, most children know it as a pretend celebration of colored-egg laying bunnies, with parents being part of the game. Christians view it as the celebration of the miraculous renewal of the life of Jesus. Historically, it is the current iteration of a equinox and spring-renewal holiday that probably predates Jesus, Moses, and maybe Abraham. Adolescents and college students know it as Spring Break, a time to go somewhere warm, drink, and maybe get laid.
Legally, the notion that governments should be separate from religion has been rather shredded by the U.S. Supreme Court. The last case I know of that actually evoked the “establishment of religion” clause was a strange case out of New York, Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet in 1994, when a 6-3 split court ruled that a Hassidic Jewish community could not create a school district whose boundaries carefully wrapped around the geography of their community. Curiously, the alleged purpose was not to espouse or deny any religious belief, but to allow establishment of a school for children with special needs, receiving state funding, on the theory that the kids, who dressed in Hassidic fashions and often spoke Yiddish, would get tormented if in a school with many children from the broader population. The Court thought that the state of New York was establishing a religion.
Lately, however, the second part of the religious freedom clause “…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” has overwhelmed the prohibition on establishing religion almost as badly as the “right to bear arms” has eclipsed its predicate condition of a “well organized militia”.
Espinosa v. Montana Dept. of Revenue (2020) required Montana, which provided aid money for education from secular sources, to cease excluding religious education options.
In 2021, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia the Supreme Court held that Philadelphia could not discontinue its contract with Catholic Social Services (CSS) for the provision of foster care services. The city wanted to discontinue the agreement because CSS refused to certify same-sex couples as foster parents based on a religious objection to same sex marriages. The court said Philadelphia thus violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. When Philadelphia said they had a blanket rule against such discrimination, with some discretion allowed, the court ruled that the City was withholding its exemption so as to limit CSS’s free exercise of religion.
In 2022, the Court in Carson v. Makin dropped the pretense about possible exemptions, ceased mentioning the establishment clause entirely, and held that a Maine state law accrediting only non-sectarian schools for tuition support in districts lacking a public school violates the “free exercise” clause.
In these cases, unlike others in which individuals and corporation heads have been given the right to discriminate against people for such heretical practices as marrying persons with similar genitals or using contraception, the public’s civic institutions have repeatedly lost the right to keep their funds from promoting particular religions. Even so, a Public school acts with fiscal prudence, educational purpose, and respect to its students by scheduling school breaks without reference to the religions of their parents.
Peter Liederman
