Room 302

Sitting quietly in the classroom the students listen intently as the teacher reads to them from A Children's Illustrated Bible brought by one of the student's. Anxious to hear every word the eager young listeners in room 302 lean forward in their desks with the look of concentration on their faces. Patrolling the hallway for tardy students a school administrator hears the story of Christ being read from the Bible coming through the doorway. "Suddenly there was a knock at the classroom door and the academic director came in" as the teacher in room 302 later retold the story in a letter to the Gospel Association in Wheaton, Ill. "I almost fainted" related the teacher. As the administrator stepped into the room the students burst into excited accounts of the story they were hearing from the pages of the Bible about the birth of Christ. "The director's reaction—to request a Bible for herself." (Insight On The News Nov. 12, 1990)

So just where is this school district where children are allowed to bring Bibles into the classroom? How long will it be before both the teacher and administrator are sued in court by the ACLU for violating the civil rights of their students? At what juncture will the Anti-Defamation League sue on behalf of Jewish children for "mental cruelty, and ethnic insensitivity" by both teachers and administrators? When will a federal court issue an injunction forbidding the reading of the Bible or even mentioning it while ordering the school district to resume it's teachings of evolution as fact? At what point will Mad Madeline Murray O'Hare and her atheist group begin to picket the school demanding the firing of all involved in this blatant "violation" of separation of Church and State? The answer to all of the above questions, except the first, is NEVER.

Room 302 is located in a school district in Russia. Religious freedom has sprung to life there in a form not seen in this country since the Federal government took over the school systems of America. Lenin and Stalin have been dragged ceremoniously from the class room and in their place can often be found Christ. The Supreme Soviet in one of it’s last breaths has announced the end of a lifetime's worth of religious repression.

Meanwhile how are things in your school district here in American where everyone has "freedom of religion."

America, America, how ugly thou hast become in thy slow withering death!

Even so our tears shall bury thee in fond remembrance of things no longer seen.

Our mournful cries for thy passing shall be the dirge for thy final breath.

Oh! to have preserved sacred trust and not a nation be of such unworthy knaves!

Who dumbly watched their children, doomed by those who in evil power rule,

follow thee to thy undeserved grave. .

By Louis Beam, Reprinted from The Seditionist, ISSUE 9, Spring 1991