When I was 11 years old and entering Middle School my family moved from Miami to Alief, a suburb of Houston. Only days before my first Christmas in Texas, a large high school student wearing cowboy boots and chewing tobacco confronted me.
“You a Jew?” he angrily inquired. “How could you people not believe in Jesus after you murdered him? Did you know it’s Jesus’ birthday? If Jesus Christ ain’t the son of God, who the hell is?”
This is the type of pressure often faced by non-Christians in conservative school districts. There can sometimes be an enormous amount of coercion to conform to the majority view, particualrly around Christmas, when the “Jesus is the reason for the season” crowd, wants to let non-Christians know they are an alien species in a “Christian Nation. While I am certain things have improved since I was 11, in 1981, there are still pockets of bigotry and religious intolerance in America.
As recognition that religious majorities often make religious minorities feel left out, as well as to follow that pesky “separation of church and state” rule that keeps our country free, we don’t use public schools to shove religion down the throats of pupils. Not only would doing so be illegal, but it is also rude and obnoxious behavior – violating the spirit of Christmas.
Unfortunately, not everyone is smart enough to understand the wisdom of ensuring that our public schools are not turned into private fundamentalist church services. A terribly misguided substitute teacher in Redding, Calif., Merry Hyatt, is sponsoring a ballot initiative that would require all public schools in California to give children the opportunity to sing or listen to religious Christmas carols.
“For years and years, maybe one person has been able to ruin it for an entire school,” Hyatt said. “It’s not right. I think it’s the majority’s turn.”
Hyatt is mindlessly promoting a myopic and shortsighted idea designed to make non-Christians uncomfortable in the hope they will convert to Christianity in order to feel accepted and fit in. Portraying religious minorities as the Grinch who stole Christmas is also exploitative, because students are a captive audience who would have no choice but to endure unwanted proselytizing – sometimes at the hands of older, larger tobacco spitting students in cowboy boots.
Of course, the unspoken subtext is that such bullying is precisely what people like Hyatt are truly after. They want consequences to be paid for anyone who is not a fundamentalist or for GLBT students, who would also face increased persecution in a more religious public school atmosphere, given that faiths practiced in conservative areas are largely anti-gay.
People like Hyatt worship mob rule as long as they are in the majority, where they can force their sectarian views onto others. I’m not sure how tolerant people of her ilk would be if, for example, a majority Muslim public school in Dearborn, Michigan, forced Christians to celebrate Ramadan. Or, a majority Catholic public school made a picture of the Pope mandatory in classrooms. How about a majority Jewish school jettisoning Christmas songs in favor of Hanukkah ditties? What about a New Age Winter celebration in liberal public schools at the expense of Christmas altogether?
“It’s sad and it’s wrong to have a Christmas party and not mention Jesus,” said Hyatt. “It’s his birthday.”
The undeniable fact is, Hyatt can sing religious songs at any moment of her choosing, when she is off the clock. She can attend church every day of the week if she wants to. So, clearly, this is not about religious freedom, nor is it about Hyatt being denied her ability to practice her faith.
No, this is about her not being content to practice her faith privately, and having a predatory desire to inflict her beliefs on others without their consent. This is about her wanting to use public money to peddle her religious ideas on public property – which is paid for by all of us.
Prior to her stint as a substitute teacher, Hyatt taught at a Christian school for a year. This, of course, was the proper venue for her cloying need to indoctrinate children and hammer home her narrow worldview. Instead, she wants to obliterate parents’ rights, by subjecting children to religious dogma and a conservative worldview that violates the beliefs of many mothers and fathers.
Under her proposed measure, students who don’t want to participate, or whose parents don’t want them to participate, could be excused.
“They can have a holiday party in the other room,” she said. “Or if they don’t want a party, they can have social studies or some other learning experience.”
Yes, of course they could, and be heckled and treated like heathen freaks by their peers…just the way intolerant zealots like Hyatt want it to be.
This woman must be off her mind. How dare she try to prosletyze.
She has to be reminded that we have separation of church and state in this country.
In the 1950s, in public schools, we were required to hear the 23rd psalm read in the auditorium as well as sing Christian songs for their holidays. The courts eventually wisely ruled that this was wrong.
Religious education is done at home or at an institution for religion. This is not right for a public school. How dare, this wacko, Merry Hyatt, try to impose her religious values on others. Don’t you dare try to single out non-Christians as well as atheists. Who do you think you are?
You are a narrow-minded, frustrated spinster who needs to wake up to the 21st century.
Would you like if I tried to emphasize my religious values on you?
I wish I were the principal of the school where you attempt to do these things. Your license should be revoked. What nerve you have!
P.S. Miss Hyatt, Your actions would not win you the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at next year’s Oscars.
In addition, isn’t education supposed to include all children and never single out any child? What kind of stigma are you attempting to place on non-Christian or atheistic children?
From the picture of you, you look similar to Mary Todd Lincoln in both facial expression and clothing worn. Please note that Mrs. Lincoln died in an insane asylum in 1901.
That’s fine, Merry, as long as you’re okay with me bringing an assembly to your school on the last week before Winter break where I talk about the case for nonbelief.
Wouldn’t be okay with that, now would you?
Thank you for this. I was one of the few Jews at my school in a Dallas suburb in the early 90′s and it was brutal. I was constantly asked why I didn’t believe in Jesus or how I didn’t know who Mary and Joesph were and the whole bit. I was upset that these kids couldn’t understand why I was different from them when I could understand and accept easily that they were different from me. It was oppressive.
Things started off like this in Germany in the 1930s. The Jewish people were immediately placed in a position of being ostracized from German society. Again, who the hell does this modern day Salem witch think she is?
Which ultra-right wing organization is promoting Ms. Hyatt? Lady, campaign instead for health care reform, and other worthwhile reforms. Am Yisroel Chai, Ms. Hyatt- The nation of Israel lives. It’s children and all others of different faiths make up the American dream. A narrow minded numb skull such as yourself shall never destroy that dream.
I am still thinking of Merry Lunatic. Doesn’t she and her followers realize the damage she would cause. Non-Christians would be looked upon with suspicion and subjected to all kinds of taunts? Violence would invariably prevail. Is this what the Merry one wants? About time the majority took over, she says. Lady go to hell. Sorry to say this, but I know what you think of Jews and other non-Christians. The U.S. was NOT predicated on majority rules when it comes to religion or race.
Will someone please investigate why Merry Hyatt taught briefly in her respective schools? The principals probably realized what kind of nut-job this is and they wanted her bounced.
The egotism in such people is astounding. It’s all about me, me, me and my beliefs! To heck with the rest of the world and what they believe.
When I was in High School in the early 70s, a kid’s religion was such a non-issue. Not only were Jewish kids not harassed for being non-Christian, I don’t think most of us even knew who was Jewish and who wasn’t. But this was in New Jersey, not Texas–enough said. Forty years later and things obviously havent changed much down there. Someone must have told that s**t-kicker that you were Jewish, I doubt if his piscine intellect was capable of figuring that out on his own.
You should have told him that you were a Druid. He’d still be pondering that one. PS…I wonder if he knew that Jesus was a Jew!?
I just love how fundies like this Merry Hyatt person think that their religion should be shoved down everyone’s throat, like it or not.
And how lovely that non-Christian students could have a “Holiday” assembly in another room or some alternative “learning experience”. Who in the hell does this b***h think she is??!
I don’t have children but if I did, if my school district imposed this Christianist crap I would be suing the school system pronto.
I have taken time to read about a third of the comments at the Sphere site and the ignorance and mean-spiritedness of the fundamentalists is simply amazing–distressing as well. Of course, there was MORE than enough of the homophobia for which the religious wrong is justly infamous. Still I guess this is what we can expect from Christian Triumphalists.
I am a Pagan and I would never want the Christian religion rammed down my child’s throat if I had one. I honestly believe religion needs to be kept out of the schools because if you have one religion you must include the others…it would be impractical and ridiculous.
What on earth ever happened to parents raising their children, teaching them values and religion, if they profess one? I was raised Lutheran, by pretty conservative parents in the 1950s and 1960s, but once I left parochial school, I never once heard them say that they expected the public schools to teach me religion. C’mon people! It’s not rocket science. If you want your child taught your religion, then teach them at home on your own time, send them to after-school religious instruction, or send them to a parochial school.
Growing up in New Rochelle, NY in the 1950s, until my Jewish teacher told all of us Jewish students not to say the Christian prayers during assembly. She wouldn’t even let us stand up.
Until she told me these were Christian prayers, I had no idea I was praying to Jesus. If I had known, I would have stopped myself, because I knew what happened to my mother when she was 5,a kindergarten student in the Bronx.
Some older Catholic boys took her jump rope, put it around her neck, strung her up from a basketball hoop and told her they were going to kill her because she was a Jew and she killed Jesus. By the time the principal cut her down, her tongue had already turned black. My 90-year-old mother remembers that attempted murder as if it happened yesterday.
A few decades before, her parents escaped the antisemitic pogroms in Russia, believing that in America they would not be murdered because they were Jewish.
The principal who cut my mother down from the basketball hoop told her parents not to call the police, or the boy’s families might attack them. Her brother and mother walked her to and from school every day after that.
So I see not much has changed since 1924.