Prayer in Arizona

[iampunha]

Okay, folks . . . here’s another suspected UL to debunk. I looked on snopes and couldn’t find it, so here goes:

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=13814300

The link is to a poem with excerpts such as

“Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.
If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.”

Sorry if I’m posting copyrighted material . . . I don’t think this is, though.

Anyone care to point me to a debunking?

[Kimstu]

iampunha, I’m not sure exactly what it is you’re asking for a “debunking” on. That an Arizona schoolkid wrote this poem? No idea whether that’s true. That school-mandated prayer is unconstitutional and has been so ruled by numerous courts? Perfectly true, can’t debunk it. That this has really had the effect of stifling constitutionally permitted prayer in schools? Now you’re talking.

From a 1998 ACLU press release:

May 7, 1998 – At Public Schools, Religion Thrives

As the nation observed the 10th annual National Day of Prayer, signs abounded in the Washington area and across the country that 36 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled compulsory, school-sponsored prayer unconstitutional, praying and other types of religious activities are flourishing in public schools, the Washington Post reports.

Members of Free Fall, one of an estimated 10,000 Christian clubs in the country’s secondary schools, circle Sherwood High School’s flagpole every morning for a pre-class prayer, and gather weekly, after school, for 90-minute Bible meetings. At suburban schools in Burtonsville and Herndon, Muslim students say their midday prayers in the library or empty classrooms.

The Jewish club at Magruder High School in Gaithersburg recently organized a Holocaust remembrance day. The Bible club at Bowie High School meets daily in the senior lounge. In the District, few high school assemblies take place without gospel songs from the choir, and students often initiate prayers at school events. And in Prince William County, about 40 student-athletes assemble one morning a week in Stonewall Middle School’s gym for a pre-class “huddle” that features basketball, an inspirational speaker and a closing prayer.

These on-campus activities reflect a broad consensus that has emerged on what is permissible and forbidden when it comes to religion in public schools, the Post said. […]

But they stress that a variety of other religious activities are, in fact, constitutionally protected at public schools. Students have the right to organize religious clubs as long as they are student-run, voluntary and follow the same rules as secular clubs.

Such clubs, which may include Bible study and prayer groups, are entitled to the same access to school property, school newsletters and public address systems as any other student group. Individual students may bring religious books to school, wear religious symbols, say grace in the cafeteria and plead (privately) for divine help before tests.

Students may perform personal religious rituals during school hours as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others or disrupt school activities. They can also discuss religion with their peers and distribute religious literature as long as they don’t harass other students. […]

Student religious groups, predominantly Christian clubs, have proliferated in the 1990s. In 1989, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes had two prayer groups, or huddles, in area schools. Today, said Dan Britton, who heads the FCA’s Northern Virginia office, “we’re . . . working with over 150 schools and about 5,000 kids on a regular basis” in the Washington area. “We’re in every single Fairfax County high school,” Britton told the newspaper.

Nationally, FCA huddles at secondary schools, which are supervised by coaches, have risen from 3,938 in 1990 to 6,476 today, FCA officials said.

Challenge 2000 Alliance, an umbrella group of about 50 Christian youth organizations, estimates that more than 10,000 student-run Christian clubs exist in the nation’s secondary schools.

“Praying is against the rule”? Nonsense. I can’t find any particular Arizona-related court case striking down an unconstitutional school prayer requirement that might have been the inspiration for this, but there are lots of such cases involving such laws in other states. Anyway, hope this helps.

[schief2]

I’m also a bit mystified as to what it is you’re looking to debunk…the authenticity of this poem?

Hard to say, but yeah, it could well be bogus.

It might be real:

Bagdad is an actual small town in the middle of BFN in my home state, and from personal experience, small-town Arizona in general tends to be as conservative and religious as anywhere I’ve been, except for maybe the rural deep South.

Also, the writing does seem pretty good for a teenager, but IMHO it’s not out of the range of possibility for a bright, bored, religious kid to come up with something like this. I mean, the vocabulary’s pretty fair, but with such a singsong AABB rhyme scheme, it ain’t exactly a complex work o’ literature.

But it seems more likely that it’s fake:

Typing in ‘school prayer bagdad arizona’ in google gets you dozens of carbon-copy postings of this, and almost every last one starts out “This was written by a teen in Bagadad, Arizona.” That’s it. The EXACT same line, but no name, no credit, no nothing.

There’s few exceptions, though: a few sites out there like this one, which claim it was “posted on the Bagdad Public Bulletin board 1/28/2000.” BUT they still don’t have a frickin’ NAME on them.

But I came up dead trying to search for this so-called bulletin board on the net, or even any other reference to it other than in the context of this poem. Then it hit me that maybe instead of some message base like this, they literally mean…a bulletin board, some piece of cork somewhere that someone first tacked this up to.

And if that’s the case, good luck trying to get any farther on tracking down the source.

For what it’s worth, when searching by date on Hotbot I couldn’t find a single site with this poem on it before October 1st of this year, so it does seem to be something that’s just making the rounds in the last few weeks…

But all in all, I bet it’s fakery, at least in the sense that it wasn’t written by some teenager stuck in nowhereland Arizona. For instance, check out http://www.freehomepages.com/crawdad/Children/children.html (scroll down to the bottom) which has TWO versions of this poem, one allegedly written by ‘an anonymous 12 year old from Boston’, and then after it has the Arizona version, which is almost word-for-word identical except for a few new stanzas.

My non-expert conclusion: bogus.

[Diceman]

I don’t see anything to debunk.

It could have been written by a teenager, and there’s really no reason to believe that it wasn’t. Perhaps he/she posted it anonymously because they were afraid of getting in trouble with the school officials. There are plenty of asshole teachers and principles who would take this kind of message personally.

[Opus1]

Snopes link:
http://www.snopes2.com/message/Forum15/HTML/000009.html

Doesn’t sound like it was written by a teen in Bagdad, Arizona. Why am I not surprised? After all, Christians have been misattributing authorship to books for nearly 2,000 years, so why change now?