I would like to clarify my position on certain things.
Some poster’s here seem to feel that disallowing school prayer, the mention of G-d, or certain morals in the public sphere is a “Jewish” position.
It isn’t and it never has been.
It’s an atheistic/liberal position that has led to the degradation of the public school system and the society that lives off of that on many levels.
Sadly many Athiestic/liberal organizations call themselves “Jewish” organizations and still others substitute the current values of the NYT and Washington Post editorial boards for the Torahs values and call them Jewish Values.
They are Jewish values only in so much as they are held by (probably intermarried) Jews who may attend services led by a female rabbi who cannot read Hebrew once a year.
There is a well know story with the Chofetz Chaim.
The Chofetz Chaim used to travel from town to town selling his seforim he once passed a church and the non-Jewish wagon driver failed to cross himself.
The Chofetz Chaim then got off saying that he could not travel with someone who does not believe in anything.
THe public school system of old was not perfect in any way and Boruch Hashem we now have a cheder system. But as severl “old timers” have told me.
It used to be Jews attended public schools and they may not have learnt how to be Jews but at the very least they learnt how to be people, the basic morals of right and wrong.
Now-a-days they do not learn even that. Instead they are taught dasic morals of liberal society in the guise of “freedom of religion”.
It is illegal to pray in Public School but it is legal to teach Heather had two mommies.
It is illegal to display the Ten Commandments but it is legal to teach young girls how to properly do “acts” that define married life.
It is “controversial” for girls and boys to be required to study separately and it is equally controversial to demand that female teachers and students dress in way that their body is not on display for all to see and focus on.
So I wonder what exactly was more “damaging” to the USA as a whole and the Jewish people in particular.
School prayer and separate classrooms or the current state of the Public School system?