Ok, lets talk about the Ten Commandments in the schools.

The Supreme Court and ACLU don't say you can't have a moral code in the schools. They don't say you can't teach and demand high moral standards. You are familiar with the "Code of Honor" which is used in places such as WestPoint. The school “Code of Honor” binds every student in the school. There is no cheating, no lying, and no stealing. The students are honor bound. The teachers walk into a classroom, hand out the test, and leave, knowing the students will not cheat and if any student does cheat the others will report it and the student will be expelled.

Nobody is stopping the public schools from adopting a code of honor. The student council can propose an honor code and have it adopted by the student senate and signed by every student in the school and enforced by the student court, etc.

What we can't do is take the honor code from our religion and teach it to everybody in the school because we believe it is the true honor code ordained by the God of our religion.

The Religous Right tries to tell us that not letting them post the Ten Commandments in the school is undermining morality. But if they really cared about morality, they would be working in the schools to establish and implement good sound honor codes through acceptable channels.

However, they really don't care about morality. They are actually looking for an opportunity to evangelize students of other religions, without their parent’s permission. If they can't have their religious moral code, they don't want any.

When the courts stepped in to stop these tactics, they started pulling their kids out of the public schools and putting them in Christian schools. "If we can't have it our way, we are going to take our ball and go home."

But when they do this, they give up the opportunity to carry the influence of Christ to our society. If all the parents who care about morality, pull their kids out of the public schools, who will work with the student council and the student senate to develop a sound honor code for our public schools.

We can have high moral standards in our schools; we simply have to work for it without blatant attempts to evangelize.

You can't have religious freedom if you won't allow others to believe in their religions.

Whenever a political candidate comes out and says "I strongly support the posting of the ten commandments in the schools" his or her opponents in the race need to shout loudly "My opponent has come out as being strongly opposed to religious freedom." Freedom is only freedom if it is freedom for all. It is not freedom of religion if only those who agree with us are free to practice their religion. Many religions claim to have the "truth" and that all other religions are false. Therefore, freedom of religion can only exist if religious people are willing to allow others to be wrong. Freedom of religion requires us to permit persons who we believe to be wrong to teach and try to persuade others of their ideas of the truth.

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Steve Falkenberg

Steve.Falkenberg@eku.edu