I set this page up to bring more attention to this issue at Stevens Creek Elementary school in Cupertino, CA (an affluent city in Silicon Valley), following the lead of Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest who brought it to my attention. Since then I have contacted a source who provided me additional details.
SUMMARY
A quick review of the lawsuit and the media brouhaha instigated by Stephen Williams' supporters indicates that this has all the makings of a typical right-wing hit job: a frivolous lawsuit, false propaganda (by the plaintiffs and the media) and intimidation/character assassination [No offense is intended here to conservatives in general, I am really referring to the right-wing media and Far Right here. There are genuinely concerned (and staunch) conservatives who don't approve of this lawsuit or the Far Right's/media's behavior - and who support Principal Vidmar. Please take a moment to click here for more on this].
The school and its staff (especially Principal Vidmar) have been deluged with scores of nasty emails and phone calls including hostile comments such as "We hope you burn in hell". Another call was made to one of the teachers on 12/9/04 at 1:30 am saying "I know who you are, where you live and that you work for that godforsaken school." This kind of intimidation is making it very difficult for parents or teachers to speak out publicly against the nastiness and false claims behind the lawsuit. [I have therefore posted a special request on Dailykos asking people to take action, by including the text of a letter I wrote to the CUSD Superintendent and Board].
The reality here is that the teaching material of Mr. Williams is unbelievably slanted towards promoting God, religion and Christianity ("Christian nation" propaganda) while leaving out easily available, copious amounts of material that contradict the picture he was trying to provide the students. Some of his teaching supplements were even found to be bogus or dubious in origin [see some examples in Exhibit E and Exhibit G]. It shows a complete disregard for providing young students a well rounded perspective on what the founders of the United States really thought, not just about God or religion, but also about how God or religion should interact with the business of Government. It tells me that the principal may indeed have had good justification for doing what she did.
Let me add a clarification in response to some emails I received. The objective of this page is not to claim that the Founding Fathers of the United States were irreligious or had no faith in Christianity (even though there are quotations presented here that gives the impression that some of them might have been that way). Indeed, if we set aside some of the prominent Founding Fathers, there is a fair amount of evidence that Americans from that era tended to more religious than not - although they craved for freedom of religion, which was one of the reasons many of the migrants came to this country. However, in terms of the Founding Fathers themselves, the real issue we are dealing with in this incident is not whether they were devout Christians but whether they believed religion or church needed to be an integral part of the Government of the United States. The issue is also not whether John Adams or Abraham Lincoln or any of the others that Mr. Williams quoted were religious - it is whether they were blindly religious in the manner portrayed by Mr. Williams in his "supplements".
[Note: The lawsuit has a fair number of documents. I have reviewed most of them and the details of that review were used to compile the summary (above). The review is available (below) starting here; to contact the media to ask them to provide the real facts on this story please go to section 6].
On another serious note, this episode demonstrates yet again why much of the media in this country is not liberal by any means, but is rather driven to report a "he-said she-said" perspective with little independent fact checking. The right-wing media, as usual, is openly dishonest and fraudulent (as I have summarized in Appendix A). Dave has chronicled this in this update (edited on 12/6/04 to include a correction in Dave's post):
The New York Times, in God, American History and a Fifth-Grade Class, writes today about the Thanksgiving-week "Declaration of Independence Banned" story. They cover the story in a he-said/she-said manner, saying the teacher's contrived lawsuit,
"...has single-handedly turned the Declaration of Independence into a powerful tool for the Christian right in its battle against secularist teaching of colonial history..."
The Times story does not even mention that the controversy -- the reason they are covering the story at all -- only exists because of the inflammatory claim that the Declaration of Independence was banned by the school because it contained the word 'God,' and does not refute this outright lie beyond one "he said" statement. The school had not banned the Declaration of Independence, it had asked a teacher to stop giving unconstitutional "supplemental handouts" (like this, perhaps?) to students.
The original story surfaced in the Right's echo chamber (Drudge, Limbaugh, Fox...) the day before Thanksgiving -- carefully timed to make it impossible to refute for several days, and to stir up emotions at family dinnertables. Now the story is widespread, which is probably the reason the Times addressed it at all. A Google search of "Declaration of Independence banned" yields 17,200 citations. (That is a search of the text in quotes, not for sites containing some mix of the words.)
The Alliance Defense Fund, the "Christian law" organization responsible for the lawsuit states on their website that they use "strategy and coordination" to advance their mission to "spread of the Gospel." In this case their agitprop strategy of bearing false witness to provoke argument and division has proven successful. This lie is being repeated by blogs, discussion forums and word-of-mouth "water cooler" conversations. And the intended culture-war response is evoked in the thinking of the public: they are "fed up" with "politically correct" "domestic enemies" who are taking the separation of church and state "too far."
Professional journalism again fails us. As far as I know, no "journalists" have seriously looked into the outrageous claim that a school banned the Declaration of Independence because it contains the word 'God', even though it is a major topic of discussion across the country, after Reuters allowed itself to be used to publicize and bring mainstream credibility to the lie.
Evidence backing up my summary is shown below - grouped in a few sections (some of the links to other commentary on the web are from Dave). Please peruse through the sections and then help the Principal and correct the false stories in the media by going to Section 6.
eriposte.com |
