Murray v Curlett at 35

Frank R. Zindler

June 17, 1998, marks the 35th anniversary of the landmark decision Murray v Curlett — the case that in the popular consciousness was responsible for the abolition of forced prayer and Bible reading from the public schools of America. But to hear the Bible-thumpers tell it, 17 June 1963 was the day that “God got kicked out of the classroom,” and it became almost a capital offense for children to pray in school. Since that fateful date, America has gone to hell in a hand basket. Abortion was legalized, crime has reached all-time highs, teen-age pregnancies are pandemic, reading levels of 12th-graders have declined, our public schools are no longer safe places to send our children, and jay-walking is no longer punishable by amputation. Practically everything that ails America has been the result of the abolition of school prayer. None of these terrible statistics would now be true if “the most-hated woman in America” - Dr. Madalyn Murray O’Hair - hadn’t asked the US Supreme Court to prohibit coerced recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and reverential reading of the Bible in the public schools of Baltimore back in 1962.

Just how it was that abolition of five-minute, daily exercises in reality-testing failure could have had such far-reaching effects is never explained by the purveyors of the preternatural, nor are they able to explain why the effects should have been so severe - when throughout the same period there has been a steady increase in church attendance, and church membership is alleged to be at an all-time high. Why should the elimination of several minutes of insincere rote recitation of a canned prayer so totally outweigh the many hours of supposedly sincere, heart-felt devotion carried out in churches? Why should obeying the supposed commandment of Jesus in Matt. 6:5-6 have led to the down-fall rather than the exaltation of our nation? (For readers who haven’t memorized the Bible, Matt. 6:5-6 reads: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret...”) Skeptical, inquiring minds would like to know.

While American Atheists is proud that it was its founder who brought the suit that did so much to liberate the public schools from religious domination, we acknowledge the fact that the process of liberation still has a long way to go before the public school is a completely secular institution in compliance with the principle of state-church separation implicit in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. (That is one of several reasons we are still in business and still fighting!) We acknowledge also that Madalyn Murray O’Hair did not achieve this feat single-handedly. There were already several Supreme Court rulings that provided a strong foundation for her case. Then too, there was the parallel case of Abington School District v Schempp, which worked toward the same end - but without any acknowledgment of the legitimacy of Atheism as a properly American lifestyle. (Indeed, Ed Schempp’s testimony explicitly disavowed Atheism, worrying that the word atheism was often connected with “atheistic communism,” and had “very bad” connotations such as “un-American” or “Red,” with “overtones of possible immorality.”)

Animus against Atheists - and Madalyn Murray in particular - ran so high 35 years ago that even the Supreme Court itself seems to have indulged in a spiteful act in the very process of publishing its decision. Despite the fact that the Murray case had been given an earlier docket number than the Schempp case (119 vs. 142) and presented oral argument earlier (Feb. 27 vs. Feb. 27-28, 1963), the Murray name was expunged from the legal records by the simple artifice of combining the Murray case with the Schempp case and referring thereafter to the combined cases as Abington School District v Schempp rather than as Murray v Curlett - as priority would normally require. But Unitarians, such as the Schempps, were (and still are) more respectable than Atheists. As American Atheists celebrates its own 35th anniversary along with the court decision that gave it birth, it is resolved to narrow that “respectability gap” - to show to one and all that Atheism is as “American as apple pie,” and that it, not theism, is the more rational foundation upon which to erect an ethic, a society, and a system of government.