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“They can just be quiet and not interrupt.”
This was the response on Wednesday from an elected member of the Alabama House of Representatives when told that his bill requiring a daily Islamic prayer in all Alabama schools would not be well received by students who are Christians.
“Nothing in this bill is requiring that they participate,” he said.
Instead, the Christian students are supposed to just sit there quietly, listening to the school-led Islamic prayer, and not interrupt, he said.
This is not the way our founders intended.
And if you agree with that, you’ll undoubtedly also agree when I tell you that what actually happened was the exact opposite.
An Alabama House member, Reed Ingram, a Republican representing Pike Road, stood at a microphone in front of a House committee, and with a straight face, attempted to tell people that the founders of the country wanted Christian school prayer every day.
No one asked why, if that was the case, did those same founders make the very first right in the Bill of Rights include the fact that our government would make no law establishing a national religion or prohibit anyone from practicing any religion they’d like.
I suppose it’s possible, given that Ingram either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend that 1st amendment, that he skipped over it entirely and started on the amendment about guns. That’s the only reasonable explanation I can imagine for a grown human in 2025 to stand up and say with bold confidence that our founders expected this to be “a Christian nation.” He said it repeatedly.
I mean, is this really what y’all think? That the founders wanted “a Christian nation” but were just being super-secretive about it? Do we need to look at a DaVinci painting to find this hidden message, or does Nic Cage need to steal the real Constitution for us to finally see it?
Because in the one we’ve all read and studied, it most definitely doesn’t say that. And every page of the that thing was blank when they started. If they wanted this to be “a Christian nation,” surely they would have put that in there somewhere, instead of, you know, the exact opposite of that.
Ingram’s bill isn’t just stupid, though. It’s also hurtful.
Schools that fail to participate in leading a daily Judeo-Christian prayer and Pledge of Allegiance can be fined by the Alabama State Department of Education. Up to 25 percent of a school’s state funding can be “clawed back,” as Ingram put it, should they fail to appropriately participate. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars for some school systems.
Imagine a world in which a school system loses 25 percent of its state funding for following the U.S. Constitution.
But this is the world we live in now, it appears. One dominated by unchecked bigotry and over-confident idiocy. Where an elected lawmaker has the unmitigated gall, in a country that has prided itself on religious freedom since its founding, to put forth legislation that requires a religious prayer … and then tells anyone who isn’t a believer of that religion to just shut up and not interrupt.
Ingram, and his supporters on the GOP-dominated committee that approved this offensive nonsense, trotted out all of the usual tropes to defend it. He just wants to return things to the way they used to be, Ingram told Democrat Marilyn Lands, who tried to offer some resistance.
Used to be. Ah, yes, the good ol’ days of “used to be,” when white, Christian males could discriminate openly and without fear of consequences. When the marginalized knew to shut up and sit quietly until the other-religion’s prayer was over. Back before the laws, courts and constitution messed everything up.
That prayer, Ingram also said, was going to solve the problems we have in our schools.
For some reason, it’s not hard to imagine that a man who tried to block increased funding for some of Alabama’s poorest schools would also believe that a 30-second prayer every morning is the counter-balance to poverty, discrimination and decades of unequal funding.
But don’t worry, Ingram and other Republicans said, because this bill doesn’t mandate the prayer and pledge. It only creates a constitutional amendment that would allow Alabamians to vote on the issue. Oh, cool, that makes it all better – we’ll just vote on the unconstitutional thing. Nice work, guys who swore to uphold the Constitution.
If you’d like to let Alabamians vote on something that might actually make a difference in our schools, how about letting them vote on whether they want hundreds of millions of their tax dollars funneled from our public schools and into private businesses? I bet it would go like every other “school choice” ballot initiative in every other state in the country.
No, we won’t do that. We’ll do this blatantly unconstitutional, unAmerican nonsense and drape the flag around it to make it seem as if it’s well intentioned, instead of being the very thing that will destroy the country.
As it currently stands and as it should be, there’s nothing stopping any student from praying in schools. There is nothing stopping any teacher from praying in schools. There is nothing giving preference to any religion. And there is nothing stopping any parent from praying whatever prayer they want to pray with their children for the 16 hours per day that they’re not in our publicly-funded schools.
Also, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of our lawmakers from reading the Constitution or any history book that explains why the founders of this place made freedom of religion its cornerstone.
We should mandate that.
