All unquiet on the church-state front.

It may have been a quiet spring in Lake Wobegon, but things were anything but quiet elsewhere in the country on the church-state front. All the major church-state and religious liberty controversies were in the news. Let's step back and put matters in perspective.

On the good news side, on June 4 the U.S. House of Representatives defeated the so-called Religious Freedom Amendment introduced by Republican Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, which would have allowed majority or plurality rule organized religious observances in public schools and tax support for sectarian schools and other sectarian institutions. The 224 to 203 vote fell sixty-one votes short of the two-thirds needed to approve a constitutional amendment.

A broad spectrum of religious, education, and civil liberties groups had vigorously opposed the amendment. Their representatives, including this writer, held a press conference on the Capitol lawn shortly before the vote was taken. Furthermore, President Clinton's May 30 radio address contributed to the victory for church-state separation. Clinton clarified what is constitutionally permissible and impermissible with regard to religion in public education and announced that Education Secretary Richard Riley was reissuing the August 1995 advisory guidelines that were sent to all the school districts in the country.

In mid-June, a substitute teacher in the Bronx was fired for excessive promotion of religion in her classroom. She probably would have kept her job if she had been willing to admit her mistake and promise not to repeat it, but she declined, leaving the New York City School Board no choice but to dismiss her. The religious right, naturally, took up the cudgels in her defense. On June 17, I debated televangelist Jerry Falwell on the issue on Fox Cable News. I pointed out, among other things, that the family that complained about the school religious activities were themselves conservative evangelical Christians, to which Falwell responded, "They're not evangelicals; they're Jehovah's Witnesses." Go figure.

In other good news, Californians voted on June 2 to defeat Proposition 226, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have seriously inhibited the ability of labor unions to campaign for or against candidates or ballot issues. No similar restriction would have been placed on businesses. The measure was promoted by supporters of school vouchers, who knew that knocking out the teacher unions was the only way they could get a voucher initiative through an electorate that defeated vouchers in 1993 by a 70 to 30 percent margin.

The bad news is that, on June 10, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that state funding of sectarian public schools through vouchers violates neither Wisconsin's state constitution nor the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. The bizarre ruling twisted the state constitution out of shape and trumped the appropriate U.S. Supreme Court precedents (Nyquist, 1973, and the like) with more recent but hardly dispositive rulings. The case will undoubtedly go to the Supreme Court, where its fate is uncertain thanks to appointments to the Court by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future of public education and church-state separation could well hang on the outcome of the Wisconsin voucher case. Of course, a ruling favorable to vouchers would not overcome the many state constitutions which clearly ban any form of tax aid to religious schools, but it would create turmoil in Congress and many states. Widespread adoption of voucher or similar plans would fragment the United States along religious, ethnic, social class, ideological, and other lines while driving up the costs of education in a country already suffering from inadequate and inequitably distributed funding for public education. It is no stretch to visualize vouchers almost literally feudalizing the country.

We can be thankful, at least, that Clinton vetoed a District of Columbia voucher bill and has promised to veto Georgia Republican Paul Coverdell's goofy private school aid plan that would channel nearly all its benefits to the affluent.

In other bad news, the Supreme Court opted not to hear an appeal in the Bauchman case, in which a lower court upheld the imposition of religious music at a high school graduation in Utah. The American Humanist Association, publisher of the Humanist, had joined a Unitarian Universalist Association amicus brief in the case.

And finally, abortion rights continue to be a major target of the right. Anti-choice forces in Congress and state legislatures are hard at work inflicting the "death of a thousand little cuts" on the right of women to be free of mandatory motherhood, aided and abetted by terrorists in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas who have been attacking women's clinics with noxious chemicals. (Reports indicate these latest attacks may have been perpetrated by the same person or group, as the chemicals used are all the same.)

Maybe we are simply victims of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association, executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, and the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on church-state separation and First Amendment liberties.