Contradictory classroom coercion. (The Last Word).

In Newdow v. Congress, the Ninth Circuit Court's notorious anti-Pledge of Allegiance decision, the court posed as the guardian of a parent's right to protect his child from classroom coercion. Like all organs dominated by the liberal elite, that court is at best selectively scrupulous about such concerns.

Referring to the atheist plaintiff in the lawsuit, the court wrote: "[Michael] Newdow has standing as a parent to challenge a practice that interferes with his right to direct the religious education of his daughter." Classroom recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form places "students in the untenable position of choosing between participating in an exercise with religious content or protesting," frets the court.

Although no official ever attempted to force Newdow's daughter to recite the Pledge, the plaintiff contends -- and the court agrees -- that she was "compelled to 'watch and listen' " as other students enacted "a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that our's [sic] is 'one nation under God.'" This, according to the court, is an impermissible form of "subtle coercive pressure."

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure the infinitesimal odds that the Ninth Circuit Court, or any comparable judicial body, would display similar solicitude toward conservative parents whose students face much less subtle forms of classroom coercion. For example: Every February, students, like most Americans, are admonished to burn incense at the shrine of Martin Luther King Jr., a personage of such purported sanctity that he, unique among Americans, has a holiday all to himself. It defies any rational expectation that the Ninth Circuit judges responsible for the Newdow ruling would rule in favor of a parent filing suit to suppress celebrating the Feast of St. Martin -- or Earth Day, or Kwanzaa -- in his child's school system.

Three years ago, controversy descended upon Bakersfield, California's Rio Bravo-Greeley Union School when 15 students were removed, at parental request, from an eighth grade science class taught by homosexual activist James Merrick. Several students had complained about Merrick's mannerisms and uncomfortably physical teaching style. The parents involved in the student exodus took issue with Merrick's involvement in a campaign to oust a "homophobic" member of the County Human Relations Commission, who had sensibly described practitioners of the homosexual lifestyle as "sick" and said that they shouldn't be allowed to teach children.

Applying the Ninth Circuit Court's language to this case, the Bakersfield parents exercised their right "to challenge a practice that interferes with [their] right to direct the religious education" of their children. Merrick responded by filing a complaint with the state labor board, which ruled that the school had discriminated against the teacher by permitting the parents to remove their children from his class. Rather than contest the ruling, the school board enacted a policy forbidding student transfers prompted by parental concerns about the sexual lifestyle of teachers.

In Massachusetts, the polluted fountainhead of the "gay youth" revolution, classrooms are turned into pro-homosexual indoctrination centers in the name of "classroom safety." Karen Harbeck, who has worked with the Massachusetts Governor's Advisory Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, unapologetically calls for the indoctrination and recruitment of the youngest inmates of our government school gulag: "By seventh grade it's too late. People say this is an issue mainly for high school sex education class. They're wrong; it belongs in pre-school."

High school students in Kensington, Massachusetts, were assigned to read a textbook claiming that sexual activities may be "less threatening in the early teens with people of your own sex" and that "growing up means rejecting the values of your parents." Students in a middle school in Ashland, Massachusetts, were assigned "gay" parts in a role-playing exercise about "discrimination." Two boys were compelled to pretend that they were a homosexual "couple" seeking to adopt a child; one of them was forced to utter the line, "It's natural to be attracted to the same sex." As is almost always true in such cases, parents learned after the fact about this exercise in psychological molestation.

Mike Chiusano of Beverly, Massachusetts, was caught completely by surprise in 1994 when his 13-year-old daughter denounced him as a "homophobe." "Our family was sitting around the dinner table, and quite without guile or any particular intention, my daughter ... told my wife and me about mandatory assemblies she had attended, without request for my permission, as part of 'Homophobia Week' activities," recalls Chiusano.

In classrooms from Maine to California, homosexual activists and other radicals use classroom-based coercion to undermine parental authority and subvert the values of tradition-minded students. But after all, molding students' values to fit state-imposed norms is what the government-run public school system was designed to do. This is why the Ninth Circuit Court's defense of a parent's right "to direct the religious education" of his children, fairly and generally applied, would mean the end of the government-run school system.