Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [23]
“Two years ago I didn’t even know what secular humanism was,” said parent Joy Cook of Blunt, South Dakota. “Now I realize you can be a humanist without knowing it and that there are humanists doing everything.”60
On the legislative front, Senator Orrin Hatch took up John Conlan’s crusade and succeeded in inserting an amendment into the Education for Economic Security Act that prohibited the use of certain federal funds for “any course of instruction the substance of which is secular humanism.” But Hatch neglected to define the notoriously Jell-O-like doctrine, so the sticky task trickled down to the Department of Education. But the department also dodged the Jell-O, so the requirement oozed on, still undefined, to local school boards and then quietly expired the following year without effect.61
Judge W. Brevard Hand, “Defender of the Constitution and Religious Liberty”
Was there no one with the will, the fortitude, and the shrewd intellect to defy the fearsome onslaught of secular humanism? There was. The Honorable William Brevard Hand, federal district judge of Mobile, Alabama, was a “pleasant, courtly member of the local gentry who runs his courtroom competently and courteously.”62 U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions, who later became a U.S. senator (R-AL) and ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Judge Hand a “superb constitutional scholar” whose “integrity is above reproach.”z Another lawyer described Judge Hand as a defender of a “Gone with the Wind ideology, fighting for the oppressed, underdog white Southerner whose culture is being undermined by integrationists and by technocratic central government.”
In a 1983 school prayer case, Judge Hand became a hero of the religious right for boldly ruling that while the Constitution prohibited the U.S. Congress from establishing a religion, it did not prohibit the state of Alabama from doing so. In his decision, Hand irrelevantly claimed that the public schools were “rife with efforts at teaching or encouraging secular humanism—all without opposition from any other ethic—to such an extent that it becomes a brainwashing effort.” During a preliminary hearing, Hand also stated that the courts had ignored “the religions of atheism, materialism, agnosticism, communism and socialism” and asked, “If the state cannot teach or advance Christianity, how can it teach or advance the Antichrist?”
Hand’s brazen disdain for Supreme Court precedent earned his ruling second place in the list of the “Ten Worst Non-Supreme Court Decisions” 63 by legal historian Bernard Schwartz.aa It also provoked a stern smack-down by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court declined to review the case after the appeals ruling.
Unbowed, Hand tilted at the same windmill from the opposite direction four years later. In 1987, six hundred Alabama parents backed by Pat Robertson’s 700 Club sued the Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County for violating the First Amendment by distributing forty-four textbooks that promoted “the religion of secular humanism.” In order to determine the merits of the case, Judge Hand judiciously listened to a number of “expert” witnesses, such as conservative writer Russell Kirk. Kirk had written a book titled The Assault on Religion, which he happened to have dedicated to “Judge W. Brevard Hand, defender of the Constitution and religious liberty.”64 After the testimony, Judge Hand found himself to be in agreement with Mr. Kirk and with his own opinion in the 1983 school prayer case. He concluded that secular humanism was in fact a religion and banned all forty-four textbooks, though he later pardoned four home economics books on condition that the secular humanist bits be removed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals smacked Hand down once again. At that point,