Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [19]
Back to School
But while secular humanism may have threatened England and subjugated Rome, it was no match for Max Rafferty, superintendent of Public Instruction of California and defender of youth from the onslaught of secular humanist brainwashers. Early in his career, Rafferty became a conservative darling by blaming problems in the public school system on a dull reading curriculum that included stories about “the stupid adventures of Muk-Muk, the Eskimo Boy, or Little Pedro from Argentina.” 37 Then in 1969, Rafferty’s emergency response team produced the groundbreaking Guidelines for Moral Instruction in California Public Schools, which located the true villain behind Muk-Muk and Little Pedro: secular humanism. In addition to accusing secular humanists of promoting boring literature, the guidelines also blamed them for teaching such evils as sex education, Marxism, and evolution.38
Outraged American conservatives soon answered the secular humanist infiltration of the American education system in the courts. In 1972, the religion editor of the Washington Evening Star sued the National Science Foundation “in the interest of 40 million evangelistic Christians” for funding a biology textbook that failed to mention the important science of creationism. The suit accused the government of “establishing as the official religion of the United States, secular humanism.” 39 He lost.t
Between 1971 and 1976, a group called Parents Rights sued the state of Missouri six times. Unhappy about secular humanism in Missouri’s public schools, the parents demanded their tax money back. They lost all six times.40
In 1976, Rep. John Conlan (R-AZ) introduced an amendment prohibiting federal funds for educational programs “involving any aspect of the religion of secular humanism,” which passed in the House but failed in the Senate. In the subsequent congressional election, Conlan lost. Two years later, he published an article in the Texas Tech Law Review to defend his position that secular humanism was a religion. To bolster the argument, he and coauthor John Whitehead described the alleged creed’s central tenets (evolution, Man-worship), listed its prominent adherents (Hitler, Stalin, and John Dewey†), and capitalized its name.41 Since Secular Humanism was a religion, they reasoned, teaching religious dogma like evolution in public schools violated the First Amendment.
† John Dewey is one of America’s most important philosophers and an influential educational reformer who criticized the traditional rote learning approach to pedagogy and promoted teaching practices that emphasized children’s individuality. He was a religious humanist who opposed what he called militant atheism. Nonetheless, conservatives have caricatured Dewey as a pernicious secular humanist, the architect of the liberal occupation of American public schools. The conservative magazine Human Events ranked Dewey’s Democracy and Education the fifth “most harmful” book of the past two hundred years after The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Right-wingers frequently represent Hitler, Stalin, and Dewey as an evil triumvirate of youth corruptors, despite the fact that Dewey was a staunch anticommunist who despised Stalin and presciently called Hitler “the greatest threat to world peace today” five years before the Nazis unleashed their blitzkrieg on Europe. (“Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Human Events 31 May 2005, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=7591; “Dr. John Dewey Dead at 92; Philosopher a Noted Liberal,” New York Times, 2 Jun. 1952, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1020.html.)
The year 1978 featured a bonanza of court cases against the new religion of Secular Humanism. Creationists sued the Smithsonian