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Rappahannock New* Contributing Writer
Two weeks ago a federal court in Tennessee decided that a public school had no right to coerce children to read books assaulting their religious beliefs.
The Tennessee decision has already drawn a maelstrom of protest, detractors labelling the case “Scopes II," in reference to the trial of a Tennessee teacher during the 1920s for teaching evolution. A better comparison, however, could be made with the civil rights cases of the 1960s.
Unlike the fundamentalists of the 1920s, the parents in question were not trying to force their beliefs upon anybody else. They weren’t seeking to stop the teaching of evolution; they weren’t trying to force the schools to adopt a Christian curriculum. They simply wanted the school district to tolerate their religious beliefs by not forcing their children to read things they found unacceptable.
Whatever the ultimate legitimacy of their objections, there is no question that the stand the parents took require courage. Like the blacks who fought so nobly against segregation, these seven families faced obstacles at every turn. For refusing to read the assigned selections, their children were expelled from school. When parent Vickie Frost went to school to talk about her children’s class assignments, she was arrested. (She was later awarded a $70,000 civil rights verdict in a separate case.)
Perhaps the most savage thing they had to face, however, has been the continual ridicule by journalists and a political group with the paradoxical title of People for the American Way (PAW). ^Journalists have denigrated the case by publicizing only the most trivial of the parents’ objections to the reading materials. People for the American Way, on the other hand, seems to have taken the opposite tack. It has tried to portray the views of the Tennessee parents in near apocalyptic terms, suggesting that if their requests are granted it will lead to the destruction of public education. Not content with attacking the parents’ beliefs, PAW has tried to twist them beyond recognition. On the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Anthony Podesta from PAW charged that parent Vickie Frost objected to the equal treatment of other religions. “She testified that what >he objected to in the books
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