Is Iowa saying bye-bye to the separation of church and state?
PACG's dear friend and co-founder of One Human Family-QCA, Rabbi Henry Karp, wrote this article for Bleeding Heartland. It's an important read.
As an Iowan, a Jew, and a rabbi who has served the Quad Cities Jewish community for nearly 40 years, I was beside myself when I read Dr. Thomas Lecaque’s guest column in Iowa Starting Line about the school chaplain bill moving through the Iowa legislature. Having made its way through the House and the Senate Education Committee, it is now eligible for floor debate in the Senate.
House File 884 is an offense of the highest degree to every non-Christian faith community in our state. It empowers school districts to hire chaplains “to provide support, services, and programs as assigned by the board of directors of the school district.”
If that sounds innocuous, think again, for the Senate Education Committee has already rejected an amendment that would restrict school chaplains from proselytizing students. So much for religious neutrality in our schools!
Such neutrality is dead when these school chaplains have been given the go-ahead to use their positions to promote their faith among the students. It should go without saying that doing so makes every non-Christian student in Iowa’s public schools—Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shinto, Sikhs, Atheists, and so on—vulnerable to the evangelizing efforts of these chaplains. That is simply not acceptable. Read the article here.