Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
A member of the Illinois House of Representatives almost succeeded in sneaking through a school prayer bill that encourages unconstitutional "captive audience" prayer, but he got caught by Jim Senyszyn, the Illinois representative of American Atheists. Jim is now working closely with the ACLU and with Rob Sherman Advocacy to defeat the bill and stop it from being enacted into law.
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Illinois State Rep. Jonathan Wright is the sponsor of the bill. Wright is a Republican (no surprise, there) from Hartsburg, a very small town of about 400 people located in central Illinois. Hartsburg is located about thirty-five miles northeast of the capitol, Springfield, thirty-five miles southeast of Peoria, thirty-five miles southwest of Bloomington and Normal and six miles north of Milepost 127 on Interstate 55 (Old U.S. Route 66). For reference, I-55 goes from New Orleans to Chicago by way of St. Louis, Missouri. For those of you familiar with I-55 in Illinois, mileage is measured beginning at the Mississippi River, across from St. Louis. Springfield is at Milepost 98, Bloomington is at Milepost 167 and the road ends at Lake Shore Drive (U.S. 41) in Chicago at Milepost 295.
The bill that Rep. Wright sponsored is HR 4117, the "Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act." The bill reads as an innocuous law that seems to imply only that students, while at public schools, have the right to initiate prayers which they can recite either alone or with others who choose to discretely gather together with the student who is praying.
That's what is implied by the wording of the bill, which would add Section 5 "Student-initiated prayer" to Act 20 "Silent Reflection Act" of Chapter 105 "Schools" of the Illinois Compiled Statutes and become 105 ILCS 20/5. The phrase, "student-initiated prayer," however, is a code phrase that religious zealots in this country use to refer specifically to prayers that students recite at a public school to a captive audience of other students who have not agreed to be an audience to those prayers. The coerced-audience prayers take place either in front of a class, over the school's public address system, or in a similar manner. Sometimes the P.A. is used for these coerced-audience prayers during the morning all-school announcements. Other times, these coerced-audience prayers take place at the beginning of assemblies or before school sporting events. Whenever they occur, they are most unwelcome by just about everybody except the student religious fanatic who is trying to cram Jesus down the throats of his captive audience, against their will and without their consent to having this jerk do this to them.
Rep. Wright knew that if the members of the Illinois House became aware of the real purpose of the bill, the House would have voted the bill down. Rep. Wright arranged to have the bill voted upon without debate so that other Representatives wouldn't know what they were voting on. The Bill passed the House, unanimously but with quite a few abstentions, and was referred to the Illinois Senate.
That's when Jim Senyszyn got wind of the bill. He sent out e-mail and letters to his fellow civil rights activists in Illinois, including me, and to members of the news media.
I contacted Jim to offer to work with him on getting the bill defeated in the Senate. He said that he was in touch with the ACLU of Illinois regarding this bill and that he was glad to have my participation, too.
On Wednesday, the Illinois Senate Education Committee will hold hearings on the bill. Jim, an ACLU lobbyist and I will all be there to testify against the bill and to shed the light of day on what Rep. Wright is really trying to pull by trying to sneak this bill through the General Assembly. Meanwhile, I have been in touch with the office of three of the members of the Senate Education Committee with whom I have established good relationships. Those members are Committee Chairman Dan Cronin, who has been the Ed. Comm. chairman when I have testified on other education bills; Pat O'Malley, who came in second in the Republican primary for governor, last month, and who has been a guest several times on the Rob Sherman Radio Show; and Lisa Madigan, who is the Democratic nominee for Illinois Attorney General and with whom I spoke at length last month at the Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade while waiting for the parade to begin. (The St. Patrick's Day Parade is the most important political and social event of the entire year in Chicago. It is a genuinely secular event, and everybody in Chicago is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.) I expect that I will receive a call back from some or all of the three senators during the day, today. Hopefully, I will be able to persuade Committee Chairman Cronin that the bill is such a bad piece of legislation that he will pull the bill from consideration without a hearing.
Between the work that Jim Senyszyn has done publicizing the bill, the editorials condemning the bill that have appeared in the last week in the Chicago Tribune and in the Springfield State Journal-Register newspaper, the work that the ACLU is doing and the behind-the-scenes work that I am doing with my contacts in the Illinois Senate, this bill should go down to a crashing defeat. Even if it does passes, that will only happen subsequent to an all-out effort by Illinois' leading state/church separation activists: Jim, the ACLU and me.
If you are an Illinois resident and would like to add your voice to the Senate committee hearing without traveling all the way to Springfield on Wednesday, send me an e-mail expressing your opposition to the bill, complete with your name, address (for authenticity) and phone number (for verification) and I'll read your letter to the Senate committee on Wednesday.
If you'd like to help subsidize my efforts on this project or on the many other fine projects that I work on, please contact me in one of the ways indicated below.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
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Telephone: (847) 870-0700
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