Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters defended on Monday his decision to force his state’s public schools to show students a video in which he spews right-wing rhetoric and asks students to pray for Donald Trump.
Walters told CNN’s Pamela Brown that his video is following through on Donald Trump's call for bringing prayer back to schools.
"President Trump has a clear mandate. He wants prayer back in school. He wants radical leftism out of the classroom, wants our kids to be patriotic, wants parents back in charge with school choice," Walters said, avoiding Brown’s question about what authority he has to demand students be shown his Christian nationalist prayer. "We are acting upon that agenda here in Oklahoma. That's what our parents want. Every county in Oklahoma voted for President Trump. His agenda is crystal clear, and we're going to enact it in the state of Oklahoma."
But even the state's Republican attorney general says that Walters does not have the authority to force schools to show his video.
"There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video," Phil Bacharach, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, told the Oklahoman. "Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents' rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights."
Walters first sent the video to superintendents around the state on November 15, writing in an email:
Dear Superintendent:
We are in a dangerous time for this country. Student’s rights and freedoms regarding religious liberties are continuously under assault. The newly created Department of Religious Liberty and Patriotism will be working to thwart any attempts to disrupt our Oklahoma student’s fundamental freedoms.
In one of the first steps of the newly created department, we are requiring all of Oklahoma schools to play the attached video to all kids that are enrolled. We are also requiring that that school districts send this video to all parents as well.
Students are encouraged but not required to join me in this prayer.
The email linked to this video, in which Walters criticizes the “radical left” and “woke teachers’ unions,” adding, “I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions. I pray, in particular, for President Donald Trump.” (In the video, placed on the desk before Walters are a Bible and a coffee mug with the Latin phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” or “If you want peace, prepare for war.”)
Many of the state's largest school districts aren't showing the video, which seemingly violates the Constitution's separation of church and state.
Oklahoma ranks 49th in the country for grade-school education quality, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Lawmakers in the state are slamming Walters for issuing the unconstitutional mandate to show his inappropriate prayer video.
“We’ve got such a deficiency in reading and mathematics. Those are the things that in public education, I think we need to be focusing on and not a culture war,” Republican state Rep. Mark McBride told a local Oklahoma news station
But rather than fund efforts to better educate Oklahoman kids, Walters is seeking to spend millions of the state's education funding on thousands of Trump-endorsed Bibles for classrooms, which Walters is mandating be taught in all public schools for kids in grades five through 12.
The ACLU is suing Oklahoma over the Bible-education mandate, saying that Walters’ policy “imposes his personal religious beliefs on other people's children—in violation of Oklahomans’ religious freedom and the separation of church and state.”
It’s not the first time Oklahoma has gotten in trouble for trying to infuse religion into public education.
Last June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision blocked a state policy to fund religious charter schools, saying, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
