Monday, Mar. 16, 1987

Religious Bias

The First Amendment bans any governmental "establishment of religion." So, to avoid objections from school boards, textbook publishers have often purged mention of the religious underpinnings of events like Thanksgiving or of moral values involving such matters as teenage sex and divorce. The result is a temporal outlook that critics, particularly Christian Fundamentalists, contend has become a creed of its own, secular humanism. Last week U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand, who has previously indicated his sympathy for such arguments, banned 45 textbooks from Alabama public schools because they unconstitutionally promote "the religion of secular humanism."

Hand, concluding that the history, social-studies and home-economics texts purvey man-centered views at the expense of belief in God, enjoined use of the books in any class except a "comparative-religion course that treats all religions equivalently." The next day school officials in Mobile called in the books, including the eleventh grade's sole history text.

The case grew indirectly out of a 1982 suit in which Hand upheld two Alabama laws promoting prayers in public schools. When his ruling was reversed on appeal, an undaunted Hand accommodatingly allowed a group of parents and teachers who had intervened as defendants in the prayer dispute to proceed as plaintiffs in the textbook suit, advancing claims they had first raised in the earlier case. His ruling last week prompted hosannas from the religious right. "Humanism will no longer be guaranteed a preferred position in American education," exulted Robert Skolrood, executive director of the National Legal Foundation, a group established by the television evangelist Pat Robertson that helped represent the plaintiff parents and teachers. "Humanism and its hidden agenda are now out of the closet."

Though civil libertarians had expected to lose in Hand's court, they were still stunned by the breadth of the ruling. Despite the likelihood of a reversal on appeal, Hand's decision "gives Fundamentalists a two-year supply of matches to remove what they disagree with," charges Anthony Podesta, president of People for the American Way, the liberal lobbying group that helped secure legal counsel for a group of parents who opposed the challenge to the books. "The judge has stood the First Amendment on its head."