They Haven't Got a Prayer
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Word soon leaked that a lawsuit was in the works, and in 1994, the school board held a meeting to discuss whether to fight it. By that time the school district had begun to makechanges, reprimanding the teacher who disparaged the Mormon girl's religion and, in one case, instructing a teacher not to lead students in religious songs. The ACLU, however, took the position that the previous practices were part of a larger pattern of behavior in which the district gave a platform to religion. The charge sparked a heated discussion that night, in which one parent railed against Madalyn Murray O'Hair and another lamented that "the devil is taking over the schools." "My mind was reeling," Debbie said. "We needed books. We needed teachers. Why were we talking about this?" More disturbing, she said, was the ugliness of the mood that night. When a Catholic mother took issue with school prayer, a woman behind her called out, "Catholics aren't Christians anyway." During a recess, a woman approached Debbie to inquire what religion she was. "A school board member leaned over and said, 'Don't worry. She's Baptist—she's one of us,'" Debbie recalled. "And I thought, what does 'one of us' mean?" In April 1995 the ACLU filed Jane Doe v. Santa Fe Independent School District, a wide-ranging civil rights lawsuit that sought to "remind [the school district] of the value of the separation of church and state and the need to prevent the government from endorsing one religion over another." It cited eleven infractions—from Bible distribution, to a baccalaureate service led by a Baptist minister, to prayer before football games—that had "the primary effect of advancing, sponsoring, promoting, endorsing and/or encouraging religion and foster[ing] excessive entanglement by Santa Fe Independent School District with religion." Identified only as Jane Does, the plaintiffs were described in court filings as two mothers—one Catholic, one Mormon—who each had two children attending Santa Fe schools.
Secrets are hard to keep in Santa Fe, and as those few telling details circulated around town, so did speculation about who the Does might be. Debbie Mason's daughter Jennifer—then an honor student and a student columnist for the Texas City Sun—remembered adults in her church exhorting her peers to find out who the Doe children were so they could be saved. (A youth minister later told his young parishioners that their persistent attempts to discover the Does' identities were wrong.) At school, students began viewing their Catholic and Mormon peers with suspicion, harassing and ridiculing those who seemed likely suspects, much in the same way they had vilified the children who had not taken Bibles. Around town, questions about religious affiliations became the norm, as did requests to sign petitions supporting the school district. "The petitions were an attempt to ferret out the identities of my clients," said Galveston attorney Anthony Griffin, who represents the Does. "Anyone who didn't sign them went down on the town's McCarthy list." Even school district employees were involved. So severe was the problem that the presiding judge in the case, U.S. district court judge Sam Kent, threatened them with "the harshest possible contempt sanctions" and "criminal liability" if they did not cease their investigations.
The daughter of one Doe plaintiff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believes that this "witch hunt" was the result of a fundamental misunderstanding. "Kids were misled by clergy members and parents who said that we were trying to put an end to religion, that we were trying to outlaw prayer," she said. "Our intention was just the opposite: We wanted to guarantee religious freedom for every student by keeping religion out of the hands of government. We were fighting for religious freedom, not against it. But people in Santa Fe couldn't understand that." Now a college student, she remembers the spring of 1995 as "a very fearful time," when fellow students called the Does Satanists and threatened to burn crosses in their yards if their identities were ever discovered. "My friends would say terrible things about the Does," she said, "and I would sit there thinking, 'If you only knew.'" She recalled visiting a friend's church one Sunday and hearing a Baptist preacher deliver a heart-stopping sermon about the lawsuit. "He got people very riled up," she said, "and it was terrifying."
A good number of people suspected that Debbie Mason, who had been outspoken in her support of the Does, was behind the suit; acquaintances began turning their backs on her at the grocery store, and soon her husband had to look for work outside Santa Fe. "I was called a lesbian, a Communist, an atheist—everything you can imagine," Debbie said. There were also phone calls that came late at night, one with the chilling admonition to "watch your children's backs." At times, it was too much for her daughters to bear. One afternoon she found Tiffany, distraught over the treatment of a Mormon friend at school that day, throwing her Bibles and her collection of cross-shaped earrings in the trash. "If this is what Christianity is about," she said in tears, "I don't want any part of it."
Santa Fe lies on a hardscrabble stretch of Texas Highway 6, along the old Santa Fe Railroad line, where the bayous on the fringe of Galveston Bay yield to firmer ground. This is a town without a center, a sprawling settlement of frame houses and trailers and prefab suburban homes, whose patchwork of old pastures and fallow farmland is slowly reverting to wilderness. Santa Fe sprang into existence in the late seventies, when the dairy towns of Arcadia, Alta Loma, and Algoa incorporated and named themselves after the railway line connecting them; it soon began luring shift workers from Texas City's refineries and petrochemical plants, holding out the promise of one-acre lots and simpler rural living. Besides football and the rodeo, there is little here by way of distraction. Teenagers still hang out at the drive-in burger joint after school, and gossip is shared over coffee at the Busy Bee Cafe, a round-the-clock diner where photos of grinning customers with their prize livestock line the wall and everyone knows each other by name. Santa Fe has the look and feel of the 1950's, and in many ways, that decade before the social upheaval of the sixties remains the ideal. "We had a kinder, gentler society back then," said John Couch, a school board member who fought for abstinence-based sex education. "A lot of people here wouldn't mind taking a step back." An engineer at a local chemical plant, Couch has become one of the most influential men in town—more so, perhaps, than any minister or politician. ("Most people in Santa Fe can't name our city council members, but everyone knows who sits on the school board," explained one mother. "That's where the power lies.") Couch, a middle-aged family man with a sober and deliberate manner, was one of the first in Santa Fe to narrow in on prayer as the key issue in the Doe lawsuit. "Most of the complaints in the suit were absurd," he said. "We were accused of letting Gideons on campus and forcing Bibles on kids. Nothing like that happened. The people who filed this suit, like many left-wing organizations in this country, wanted to make the word 'Jesus' taboo and take away our children's right to pray. And we refused to stand for that." It was a message that resonated throughout this community, where circuit preachers and revivals have been making their way up what is now Highway 6 for more than a century. Here, church signs proclaim Santa Fe's abiding loyalties, from the "Jesus Is Lord" sign at one end of town to the even larger "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart" billboard on the other. Another exhorts residents to "Pray Without Ceasing."
Until the lawsuit was filed, however, Santa Fe was known less for its religious zeal than for its racial intolerance. Santa Fe was thrust into the spotlight in 1981 when the Klan held a cross-burning demonstration here, and rumors persist that the Klan still meets by a spreading oak tree on the west side of town, thought to have once been the site of a lynching. Some locals believe that a blaze set at a low-income housing complex in 1993 was racially motivated. But nothing has stained the town's reputation more than a 1997 incident, in which several teenagers terrorized a busload of African American girls—junior high students from La Marque who had come for a basketball game—by rocking their bus back and forth, yelling racist epithets, and threatening to hang them while brandishing a piece of rope. African Americans stay clear of Santa Fe: Though the three neighboring towns of La Marque, Dickinson, and Hitchcock are racially diverse, the last census counted only nine black residents in Santa Fe. Nowhere are these disparities more painfully on display than on Friday nights, when the color divide across the line of scrimmage is often black and white.
Santa Fe ministers have suggested that one way to help heal the community's wounds is through prayer, but thus far, no such transformative powers are evident. If anything, the politics of prayer has opened even deeper divisions. Pastor Terry Gibson, who as quarterback for the Santa Fe Indians in 1967 bowed his head before every game, summed up the town's sympathies. "We had prayer before football games in Santa Fe when I was growing up and when my parents were growing up," he said. "This has been right in this community for generations. Who are the courts to tell us to change?" Like John Couch, he believes that the time when America's children were allowed to pray in school was a better time than today. He pointed to 1962, the year the Supreme Court barred states from requiring students to say morning prayers in Engel v. Vitale, as the beginning of a slow erosion of the nation's morality. "If you look at the decay, the violence, the falling test scores, so much of it began when school prayer was banned," he said.
"If you divorce morals and religion from public life, you're going to have chaos," agreed Couch. He and former school board member Mike Lopez, a self-described "foot soldier in the culture war," saw the Doe suit—and its desire to eliminate the last vestiges of school prayer—as a cause the district must fight vigilantly against and tried to get the archconservative Rutherford Institute to take on their case. "We've had activist Supreme Court justices come along in the past forty years, and rather than interpret the Constitution in a strict sense, they're rewriting history," said Couch. "In the nineteen-forties they coined the term 'separation of church and state,' but that's not what our founding fathers intended. They wanted to guarantee freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."
The first legal skirmish in the Doe suit was over school prayer: Judge Kent issued an interim order in May 1995 stating that student-led prayer was constitutional at football games, as long as it did not mention specific deities and was not a "religious sales pitch." It was a victory for school prayer advocates, since no federal judge had ever upheld the right to pray publicly at high school football games. But the board was still dissatisfied; Kent's stipulation that such prayers be "nonsectarian" and "nonproselytizing" was seen as tantamount to censorship. "The court was telling students how to pray," said Couch. More important, said superintendent Richard Ownby, "The school district was being asked to monitor student speech for religious content. We didn't want to be in the business of telling students they couldn't say a prayer if they wanted to say a prayer." In response, the board consulted with attorneys and crafted a carefully worded policy reflecting a legal theory being advanced by school prayer advocates nationwide: School prayer is a matter of free speech, not of religion. Students themselves would vote on whether they wanted invocations delivered before football games; if the vote was affirmative, they would elect a spokesperson to deliver the prayers for the season. This way, student speech was free of government involvement, the board reasoned, and was not hamstrung by Kent's ruling.
