The bestselling author of "Absolute Power" delivers a wake-up call to lovers of liberty everywhere and a call to action to conservatives and Christians to defend the religious freedom envisioned and practiced by the founders.

Persecution
How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity

Chapter One

Christianity Out, Part 1

Christian expression is treated as profanity and worse in many public schools and certain federal courts across the nation. In May 1995 Samuel B. Kent, U.S. District judge for the Southern District of Texas decreed that any student uttering the word "Jesus" would be arrested and incarcerated for six months. Lest you think this was some month late April Fools' joke, the judge expressly avowed his earnestness in his official order. His ruling stated, in part:

And make no mistake, the court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this court, that student will be summarily arrested and will face up to six months incarceration in the Galveston County Jail for contempt of court. Anyone who thinks I'm kidding about this order better think again ... Anyone who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this court gets through with it.

In fairness, Judge Kent also prohibited references to other deities "The prayer," he said, "must not refer to a specific deity by name whether it be Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, the Great God Sheba or anyone else." But let's not fool ourselves. These kinds of cases almost always involve Christian expression, as this one did. In this case, the school district had allowed students to read overtly Christian prayers. So while the court's language was nominally directed toward prayers of all religions, in reality it was targeted solely at Christian prayer, because it was the only kind at issue.

Don't think the judge's threat of criminal liability was an isolated aberration. A few years ago, Connecticut law enforcement officials threatened to arrest a man for corrupting the morals of a minor if they could prove he passed out religious tracts to a student. Even without threats of prosecution, school officials often bear down forcefully on young Christians. For example, a Vermont kindergartner was forbidden to tell his classmates that God is not dead, because such talk "was not allowed at school." School administration officials at a Kentucky public school told a student he was not permitted to pray or even mention God at school. A teacher in an elementary school in Florida overheard two of her students talking about their faith in Jesus and rebuked them, not for talking in class, but for talking about Christ in class. In no uncertain terms, she ordered them not to discuss Jesus at school.

Teachers are also sometimes targets of their school's religious discrimination. A school in Edison, New Jersey, reportedly rebuked a substitute teacher for leaving religious literature in the faculty lounge because of its potentially offensive content. Yet the school had allowed other teachers to leave literature trashing the "religious right." A teacher in Los Angeles posted his objection to the school's celebration of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month on the school bulletin board. Other teachers were routinely permitted to post items on the bulletin board without incident, but this teacher's post was removed.

Another teacher was singled out in a Denver elementary school, where the principal removed his Bible from the library and also made him remove his personal Bible from his desk, where he kept it to read during silent time. School officials didn't want that book in the students' sight, so they prohibited the teacher from reading it and made him hide it during the school day, even though he never read from it to his students. In Ohio, thanks to the National Education Association (NEA), teachers who requested that their mandatory union dues be paid to a charity rather than the union's politically liberal causes were annually subjected to an invasive questionnaire. "For years the NEA has issued this particular scheme to intimidate and harass teachers of faith who dare to challenge their radical agenda," said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. But this case had a happy ending when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in response to a religious discrimination suit, ordered the NEA to curtail this practice." The NEA and state teachers' unions use this scheme in other states. But when challenged, they usually meet the same fate. That's what happened recently in California. To avoid a religious discrimination action, California Teachers Association officials reluctantly consented to redirect an Arcadia elementary school teacher's monthly union dues to charity because the union's political and social causes were incompatible with her religious beliefs."

Unfortunately, these are not exceptional cases. They are part of a growing pattern involving anti-Christian discrimination in public schools that originated with relatively modern rulings of the United States Supreme Court. Before we examine the modern era, it will be helpful to familiarize ourselves with the history of education in America and how the nation's education framework developed from a private into a public system."

Development of Public Education

During the first colonial settlements, American education was decentralized and mostly private-though there was a movement for compulsory education motivated, ironically, by the colonists' belief in the importance of Christian study. But as we'll see, around the middle of the nineteenth century, starting in New England, the nation began to establish publicly run and funded schools ...

Persecution
How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. Copyright © by David Limbaugh. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity by David Limbaugh
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