Posted on 07/09/2004 4:29:12 AM PDT by xzins
Sidney Gerber Schempp, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling abolishing mandatory Bible-reading in the nation's public schools in 1963, has died in Hayward at age 91.
Her children, who were also participants in the court case, remembered Mrs. Schempp on Thursday as not only an advocate of the separation of church and state, but a devotee of nature and peace as well.
The court case began in 1956 when her oldest son, Ellery, a high school junior in a Philadelphia suburb, objected to the daily reading of Bible verses in his homeroom. Pennsylvania law required the reading of 10 biblical passages at the start of each school day, followed by the Lord's Prayer.
Ellery, inspired by a freethinking English teacher, tried reading from the Koran or the Hindu Veda as alternatives, and was repeatedly taken to the principal's office for a lecture, recalled his younger brother, Roger, then a junior high school student.
Mrs. Schempp and her husband, Edward, both active in the Unitarian church in Germantown, Pa., contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and sued the school district. When they won a lower-court ruling, the state changed the law to make participation optional, but the family persisted, saying children shouldn't have to make themselves outcasts to avoid a religious ceremony that violated their beliefs.
The case of Abington Township School District vs. Schempp reached the Supreme Court in 1963 along with a suit filed in Maryland by Madalyn Murray, the atheist leader later known as Madalyn Murray O'Hair. The court had declared teacher-led prayer in public schools unconstitutional the previous year, and reached the same conclusion on Bible reading in an 8-1 decision.
The family encountered some hostility as soon as the suit was filed, said Roger Schempp, now 60 and a resident of Pennsauken, N.J.
"I got called everything from atheist to communist to un-American'' by fellow students, he said. Students would point out the "communist house'' when the school bus passed the family home, he said, and someone put dog excrement on the doorknob and front steps. The family also won support from some students and a few teachers, who had faced penalties under the law if they refused to hold the ceremonies, he said.
....A memorial service is scheduled Saturday at Starr King Unitarian Universalist Church in Hayward
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
This is what happens when you combine "honest" Abe Lincoln's corrupt brand of federalism with judicial activism and socialist community funded public schools. A single unitarian leftist Jew can somehow convince an activist court to twist a simple harmless bible reading into congress making a law establishing religion.
It didn't seem to matter that congress wasn't making any law establishing a religion. The socialists and federalists are had their way with us anyway.
There is of course a simple solution: private or parish schools. In this day and age, it's the responsibility for parents to make sure their children are learning in a wholesome environment where their faith isn't challenged by sectarian Bible lessons, nor by the relentless secularism and immorality of most public schools.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want Protestants talking to my son about the Bible and the they probably would not want a Catholic talking to theirs.
True, it is off to parochial school we go (that is, if we can find one that teaches according to the trye teachings of our Church.)
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