From as far back as I can remember, I have never considered myself an ambivalent, or apathetic citizen. My family, first generation Americans, instilled in me the importance of participation, if in no other way, paying, not just attention to but strict attention to, issues and voting. So it is to my chagrin that I, as have many of my countrymen, awoke one day to see that my attentive involvement in our democratic freedom was a dream. For all sorts of reasons (marriage, children, the need to help my wife keep food on the table and a roof over our heads and of course the kids homework), I had been lulled to sleep. 

The events in Cobb County, however, have awakened me and many others.

It has come to me as somewhat of a surprise that my stance and resultant lawsuit against the Cobb County Georgia School Board’s disclaimer, placed in its science textbooks, stating that evolution is a theory and not fact, has been misunderstood. 

While I am a firm adherent to the process and facts of evolution, and Jewish, my issue is not the debate between science and spiritual belief. I do not demean the religious concept of creationism or its other semantically euphemistic forms of “creation science” or “intelligent design.” Creationism is, after all, just another way for some humans to approach, supernaturally, the unknowns of the world, and it is not my business if some people choose to hold faith in it. My concern is protecting a main tenet of American Democracy, the separation of church and state.

Although there are many who agree with me because of the principle of Separation, many more agree because of the detrimental affects on our education system, and resultant position their children will hold in our future economy. Both supports are valid and essential. However, within the framework of my extreme love of country, I do hope that more people will recognize the very real threat the dilution of the separation of church and state poses to us as a free nation.

What is happening with this issue in Cobb County, and many other school districts around the United States, is just the rim of a very large and foreboding canyon. While there have been many successful excursions into that canyon, the final conquering of its wilderness has so far proven to be elusive. However, with each encounter our nation grows stronger in its defense against theocracy. The experience in Cobb is yet another paradigm for other communities to look at in the defense of all of our liberties. 

The most interesting and important thing to me, which became apparent through my deepening involvement with the political side of the issue of “science, faith and government,” is that the vast majority of Americans are sleepwalking through the daily events of our democracy. They go about their lives absolutely taking for granted that some umbrella issues, like the separation of church and state, and those covered by it like the teaching of evolution in public schools, have been historically solved. 

Not until an event happens, like the elimination, in the 1990’s, of evolution from the Kansas School’s Science curriculum, do local, and I stress “local, ” citizens arise from their sleep and confront, the up until then, stealth infiltration of the theocrats. While this is happening all over the United States, it is in fact a local phenomenon. We look out at other citizens’ communities and say, “What is going on down there and in this time and place. That can’t happen where I live.” Sleepwalking in Kansas, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New Mexico, … and where I live, Cobb County Georgia, has lead to wasteful confrontations on things that “should” have been resolved along time ago.

We have a most wonderful country. Our form of representative democracy and appropriate addiction for liberty, has given our immigrant forefathers and us, an ever-growing freedom unprecedented in history. We cannot now, however, as we have recently done, keep assuming that democracy works without oversight. While it is true that we listen during elections to those hoping to gain positions of power, we do so only with half an ear. We trust too much that their attacks on each other are not important, because “nothing will change anyway,” and “the government will go on,” and “we will remain as we are, free to live in pursuit of the American Dream.” We mindlessly go about our election process with fewer and fewer of us even bothering to vote. Unconsciously looking back on our history and seeing that we as a nation have weathered many storms, always seeming to come out ahead regardless of the trial. Always ignoring the fact that someone blew a whistle or some person was alert enough to take advantage of a chance event and foiled our demise. In other words, our democracy did not run itself. Citizen over site, interference with injustice and tyranny, and a constant struggle got us to where we are now. Yet today we look back and act as if it “just was and always will be.”

Looking at recent events, just in Cobb County and the state of Georgia, I can tell you that our form of government is not safe from quackery, misrepresentation, demagoguery, and loss of our freedom. The rewriting of history and science, the denial of American religious pluralism, and the continuing bigotry against a portion of our supposedly “equal in the eyes of the law” citizenry must be thwarted. The theocrats in our midst cultivate, through false morality, what they think will “save” America, but the reality is that they championed the demise of our wonderful county, state, and national union.

In order to protect all our faiths, even the theocrats among us, all levels of government must remain belief neutral. The way into goodness is personal; it is not reliant upon outside dogma. It is between the individual and the Universe. No one faith, under the eyes of government, must dictate to our people what morality is. The government must protect all religious and non-religious views but not promote any “one.” There is nothing confusing about the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The meaning of its words is clear. Do we have to use a specific word to understand a concept? Is not “an implement of written communication” the same as a “pen,” “pencil” or “word processor?” There is nothing else the phrase, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” can mean except the “separation of church and state.”

The cry that our belief neutral government is anti faith is a lie. The recent attack on the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution is a case at point. Science and faith are two ways of humanity trying to explain the unknown. They are both valuable but different. The differences must be honored so that both can be appreciated, and beneficial, and not destroyed by mixing them together. Camouflaging faith to look like science can only lead to destruction. What is permissible in public school is the establishment of history or philosophy classes that can and should introduce the societal conflicts that exist. There is no faith conflict. There is no scientific conflict. There is no governmental suppression. There is only a theocratic fabrication for the purpose of political control. So science teaching must not be deluded by societal confusion. 

We as a nation, through our apathy and “no time to pay attention, things will take care of themselves, life style,” have abdicated our power to a small un-American theocratic proportion of our society which has begun to dictate through their narrow-mindedness, corruptness and ineptness the course of our destiny. 

Whether or not my thoughts or viewpoint presented here are agreed or disagreed with is irrelevant. What is relevant though is that, we as a people, must awaken from our sleepwalking, start debating, and begin living up to the expectations of democracy by exercising our responsibility. Abdicating our duties by saying, “my vote, my voice, my understandings, and opinions don’t count or affect anything,” makes these statements self-fulfilling. We must remain aware that, there are times, all-important times, when just a handful of votes has decided an election.

Our democracy’s sleepwalking must stop! The alarm is ringing! Stop slapping the clock! Wake up! It is time to go to work! 

Contact Jeffery Selman

 

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