Their Timing is Off by William B. Lindley For some years now, those people promoting group prayer in public schools have claimed that the moral decay of the United States can be traced back to when "they took God out of the public schools," i.e., when the Supreme Court, in two decisions in 1962 and 1963, forbade group prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools. An example is William Murray, turncoat son of the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who recently put an ad in the Washington Times along these lines. One sentence from the ad: "As a result of this valueless education and the removal of God from our school systems, violence, dishonesty, drugs and premarital sex have surged in most areas by over 400% in the last 30 years." [Fans of logic and of clear and critical thinking will note that here we have a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy. By relying on mere timing and not making the extra effort required to establish a causal connection between two events or processes, one makes a logical error that can lead to all sorts of absurdities. America's moral decay can be traced to anything that changed around 1960 or has been steadily changing since - world population, fluorocarbons in the stratosphere, flights of jet aircraft, computers, you name it. However, let's forget about clear thinking for a little while and accept the idea that a critical event took place which caused America's ongoing moral decay. Who wants to be rational anyway? What's the fun in that?] Yes, indeedy weedy, something BAD happened, and America has been on the primrose path to perdition ever since. But just WHEN did it happen? 1962? Not quite. The critical event was not when they took God out of the public schools, but when they crammed Him into the Pledge of Allegiance. The proof of this is in the timing. You see, by 1962 the moral rot of America was well under way. William Murray, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and all their buddies remember the hippies, the flower children, Haight-Ashbury, and so forth. But they have forgotten the Beat Generation. Congress, at Eisenhower's urging and with the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy's blessing, inserted the words "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Shortly thereafter, starting in 1955-6, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and others gathered in San Francisco and launched a new and corrosive literary and cultural movement. They, the Beat Generation, are the first sign of the inevitable moral decay that resulted from having all of our schoolchildren take the Lord's Name in vain every school day. (In contrast, group prayer in public schools was far from universal; some had it, most didn't. To find the correct triggering event, one must find some change that took place everywhere. The change to the Pledge satisfies this requirement.) So now we know. The prayer activists have the right idea, but their timing is off. Table of Contents | 1995 Issues | Subscribe Truth Seeker | Feedback | Freethought.com Webmaster Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Or send check or money order to: Truth Seeker / 16935 W. Bernardo Drive, Suite 103 / San Diego, CA 92127 $20.00 annual U.S. subscription ($35.00 international). Individual issues—$10.00 + $2.50 postage and handling Or be a committed freethinker and send $35.00 for a two year subscription. Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996