A Courtroom Clash Over Textbooks

By Ezra Bowen

"It's one of the most important trials of the last several decades." So maintains Robert Skolrood, executive director of Televangelist Pat Robertson's conservative National Legal Foundation and chief counsel for the 624 plaintiffs, all Christian Evangelicals. Anthony Podesta, president of the liberal lobby People for the American Way (P.A.W.), which is providing the legal team for the defense, counters that the case is a "hoax perpetrated by people who don't want the 42 million schoolchildren in this country to learn about ideas these people disagree with -- everything from divorce to evolution." The two sides are clashing in a federal courtroom in Mobile, where the plaintiffs have brought a suit against the Alabama state board of education. At issue: whether some 45 texts used in Alabama schoolrooms illegally espouse a religion, called secular humanism by the Evangelicals, which they argue elevates man at the expense of God.

One of the most extraordinary features of the trial is that the presiding judge, W. Brevard Hand, has previously made his sympathies clear. Nearly four years ago, in a case that gave birth to this one, Hand challenged several landmark Supreme Court decisions with a ruling that not only authorized school prayer in Alabama schools but also stated that the First Amendment did not apply to the states in such cases. Although an appeals court reversed Hand's decision, he provided grounds for restructuring the issue so that the original plaintiff, Lawyer Ishmael Jaffree, was replaced by the 624 Evangelicals and the central argument became not prayer but secular humanism.

"Our claim," says Attorney William Bradford, who is defending the school board, "is that secular humanism is not a religion, and even if it were a religion, there is no evidence it is being espoused in these texts." The common legal definition of a religion specifies belief in a superior being, which would seem to be the very antithesis of secular humanism. Before the plaintiffs' attorneys rested their case last week, they called expert witnesses in an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction. University of Virginia Sociologist James D. Hunter characterized secular humanism as the functional equivalent of a religion, and, by implication, subject to the law. Hunter, however, subsequently acknowledged that the phrase functional equivalent is absent from the Constitution's First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of any religion by the Government. He also conceded that "vegetarianism, socialism, environmentalism and bureaucracy" might be construed as functionally equivalent religions.

If, as seems likely, Judge Hand rules for the plaintiffs, the defense says it will count on the prospect that his ruling may again be overturned. Yet during the 18 or more months that an appeal might take, school officials fear Evangelicals could get offending texts removed from classrooms or impose their own choices of teaching materials, thus breaking down the public school curriculum. A case similar to the one at Mobile is in progress in Tennessee, where Evangelicals object to classroom teachings that they claim do not give creationism its due and to texts that support objectionable doctrines like feminism and a child's right to defy his parents. Last year P.A.W. counted 130 incidents of analogous if less serious challenges to curriculum content in 44 states. Thus the defense sees classroom chaos spreading far beyond Alabama.

Several Mobile plaintiffs, however, argue that they seek only to restore balance to classrooms where texts and teachings have drifted so far toward secularism that history, among other key subjects, is being badly taught. Last year Nurse Judy Whorton and her husband Robert withdrew their two sons, Ben and Andy, from public school in Mobile to underline their convictions. Whorton cites a social studies text that failed to identify the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "as a pastor of a church and never mentioned the role that religion played in the civil rights movement." Such objections are seconded by Marcia Greger of Biloxi, Miss., who sat in on the trial. Greger protests of her teenage daughter's texts, "They never say what the Pilgrims came for." Some books depict the settlers' harvest celebration at Plymouth Colony as merely a congenial festivity with the Indians, making no mention of God and Thanksgiving. "Everything is from a humanistic point of view," says Greger. New York University Psychologist Paul Vitz, who testified for the plaintiffs last week, suggests that their suit is the right tactic for offsetting the bias they perceive. Says he: "They're going on the 'squeaking-wheel theory' to get into textbooks the same way that women, blacks and minorities have done it."

In mounting their legal defense, P.A.W. and the school board are aware of seeming to defend inferior texts. Says Podesta: "We agree that religion has been given short shrift in history books, but lousy books don't violate the Constitution." However, the single point on which plaintiffs, judge and defense appear to agree is that many pupils are being short-changed by texts that lean beyond the point of neglect in avoiding religion and other potentially controversial issues. Publishers protest that their products should not be judged too harshly and that, in any case, they are untainted by secular humanism. "I don't know what secular humanism is," says Donald Ecklund, vice president of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. Perhaps not. But the Mobile case makes clear that lawyerly issues aside, schoolchildren in Alabama, Tennessee and elsewhere deserve less curricular con fusion in the classroom and a more profound image of, say, Thanksgiving than as a pumpkin-pie party with the Indians.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Mobile