Is Charles Dickens t…

Is Charles Dickens too religious for today’s public schools?

A high school principal canceled a dramatic performance of Charles Dicken’s classic “A Christmas Carol,” partly because he feared it would raise questions about the place of religion in public schools.

Mark Robertson, principal of Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle, said his cancellation of a private theater group’s Dec. 17 performance on campus primarily was because school policy prohibits charging admission.

But he said if admission were free, it would have prompted a “secondary discussion about public school and religion,” the King County Journal reported.

The erasing of anything remotely religious from public life continues unabated, to the point that even the non-religious are alarmed.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat describes himself as a “secularist and agnostic,” but, pointing to a wider trend, wrote yesterday “even a lifelong doubter like me can see that something crucial is being lost, especially in the schools.”

“If kids can’t see a Charles Dickens play, hasn’t the cause of separating church and state gone too far?” he asked.

Westneat said “A Christmas Carol” may have Christian themes, but it’s not religious dogma. Character Tiny Tim’s delivery of one of literature’s best-known lines – “God bless us, every one!” – is the story’s “most overt reference to religion,” he noted.

Historical documents and bit lines in a play that hardly mentions religion at all are now fair game for this fear of the politically correct. This can’t possibly be what the First Amendment was intended to do.

I like how some folks are protesting this insanity, bring it to the ACLU who is spearheading it.

A group of demonstrators sang Christmas carols in front of the Washington, D.C., office of the American Civil Liberties Union today to protest the organization for its attempts to take religious references out of the public square.

Over 25 volunteers with Public Advocate of the United States sang at the office to highlight “the ACLU’s continuing disregard for the rights of their many pro-family targets,” the group said in a statement.

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