Friday, September 24, 1982
Page 4
Daily Nebraskan
ditoid
School prayer amendment should remain asleep
"Now they Ve laid it down to sleep.
Let 's pray the Lord its soul will keep. "
The preceeding was a commemoration of Thursday's
death of the school prayer amendment. It died a slow
death, limping through four days of debate with the
opponents arguing in favor of a filibuster and the pro
ponents attempting to break any filibuster.
The latest battle on school prayer started Monday. On
that day, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C, was unable to gather
enough votes from his fellow conservatives in the Senate
to limit the liberal's filibuster to 100 hours.
On Tuesday, the Senate conservatives lost a second
attempt to kill the filibuster.
And on Wednesday, the Senate refused for the third
time to stop the filibuster.
Those favoring the school prayer amendment worked
right through until Thursday, when their fourth attempt
to block a filibuster failed and the senate voted to table -and
thus kill - the measure.
It appears there were simply too many level-headed
senators who wouldn't allow the amendment to survive.
Those senators apparently better understand theU.S.
Constitution - and its directive that government should
not establish a religion - than do the amendment support-
en
With the 97th congressional session drawing to an end,
Helms and company won't be able to reintroduce the
school prayer measure until at least next year.
All the legislative jockeying aside now, it is clear the
amendment would have been unconstitutional.
The proposal would have eliminated the Supreme
Court's jurisdiction over cases where a state legislature or
a lower court said voluntary prayer in the classroom was
constitutional.
Its intent, said those fearful of its passage, was to open
the way to requiring prayer in schools.
What is wrong with requiring prayer in schools? Pri
marily the constitutional consideration. Remember the
1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins "Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of re
ligion ... .
While the recitation of a simple prayer before each
day's classes is not an attempt to establish a religion, it
does force a uniform religious belief upon students who
may hold other beliefs or none at all.
Although Helm's amendment was pruportedly an
endorsement of voluntary prayer, if adopted it easily
could have become mandatory prayer. Considering that,
how could any school prayer have been written to include
the beliefs of all students, and how could the saying of
such a prayer avoid embarrassing those who hold no faith?
Prayer definitely has a place in school - parochial
school. Parents who want prayer to be a part of school
curriculum can send their children to a church-affiliated
school. And those who send their children to public
schools but still wish them to pray can reach that end in
other ways; "Sunday school" programs and home educa
tion are two options.
Helm's school prayer amendment has been put to rest.
Let's hope the senator will allow it to sleep.
C 1
r
t . VvJ .. J I
Candidate Walsh discusses
defense budget, federal debt
I spoke with independent Senate
candidate Virginia Walsh Sept. 16. What
follows are portions of our conversation.
Matt Millea: Why do you think Sen.
Edward Zorinsky voted for the defense
budget when his colleague from Nebra
ska, Sen. JJ. Exon, was leading what I
9) Matthew
jr Millea
thought was a valiant fight to clean up
some of the waste in that budget?
Virginia Walsh: 1 don't think anyone
that 1 know of is convinced that we are
spending our money well or getting our
money's worth in this immense and un
precedented level of military spending.
I think Ed Zorinsky supported this be
cause he has ties to the military com
munity, to people with a vested military
Middle-aged Kilroys rebel with graffiti
I was in a men's rest room of a public
building. 1 was the only person in there.
The walls were clean.
As 1 walked out, another man was enter-
UjTj Bob
Greene
ing. There was nothing about him that
seemed out-of-the-ordinary. He appeared
to be a businessman, in his mid-30s.
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A minute or so after 1 left the restroom,
I realized that I had left a package inside. I
hurried back. The businessman was just
leaving as I entered.
My package, fortunately, was still there.
Something else had changed, though.
On the wall was a crudely worded
slogan, featuring several obscenities.
The only answer was that the business
man had written it while he was in the
men's room.
Now, we all have seen dirty scrawls on
rest room walls for most of our lives. It
seems to be a part of living in this society.
But I realized that, in all these years, I
had never seen anyone actually writing on
a rest room wall.
The slogans were always there, but I had
never given any thought to who might have
left them. I suppose if I had any subliminal
suspicion Of who did the writing, the stero
type would probably be some vacant-eyed
kid or a drunk, not-very-bright, late-night
reveler.
But this man ... he appeared to be the
sort of fellow you would see in the
executive suite of a high-rise office build
ing. I was to surprised by the incident that
I called Chicago's Institute for Psycho
analysis to see what the folks there made
of it.
Richard Telingator, a member of the In
stitute's faculty, was far less surprised than
I had been.
"Just because the man was in his mid
30s doesn't mean that his emotional age
was on that same level," Telingator said.
"What he apparently did - write on the
rest room wall - was the act of an adoles
cent. You would expect that type of be
havior from an adolescent.
"People in their 30s, 40s and 50s can
retain part of this attitude. It has nothing
to do with their chronological age. When
they do something like this man did, they
are merely expressing rebellion, the same
way they did when they were children."
Grown men who deface rest room walls
probably are going through periods of per
sonal tension, Telingator said.
"If you're a person who would never do
such a thing, then it's hard for you to
understand the concept," he said. "But the
very act of being 'naughty' makes a man
such as that feel better. It's a release for
him. He's getting away with something."
I told Telingator that I had never seen
anyone in the act of writing on a rest room
wall. He said that made sense.
"Part of the thrill of doing it comes
from the feeling that he's managing to pull
something off," he said. "If he did it while
people were there, he wouldn't have the
same kind of thrill."
But the fact that the man looked so
businesslike and responsible . . . wasn't that
a particularly bizarre aspect of the
incident?
Telingator laughed.
"I would tell you a million stories," he
said. "The business suit doesn't mean a
thing. What a person looks like on the out
side has absolutely nothing to do with
what goes on inside his head.
"People who look respectable, and seem
quite norman, are just as likely to have,
something like this going on in their heads
as anyone else. You absolutely can't make
a judgment about something like this by
looking at a person."
After talking to Telingator, I am left
with several questions.
If this guy was so tense and childish and
overwrought, why didn't he steal my pack
age? 1 V
If I had come into the rest room 30
seconds earlier, while he was still writing
on the wall, would he have just kept on
scribbling?
(el 1832, Ttfbum Co. Syndic., ir.
interest.
Millea: And yet he claims in this mailing
("Senator Ed Zorinsky Reports from
Washington," fall 1982) to have spon
sored a measure to freeze nuclear wea
pons. Walsh: This (the mailing) is misleading
language. It's the one produced in reac
tion to the Kennedy-Hat field proposal,
(sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy,
D-Mass., and Mark Hatfield, R-Ore.)
which is . . .
Millea: A unilateral freeze?
Walsh: No, no. No one has ever said uni
lateral. The question is whether we should
stop producing new nuclear weapons.
The Kennedy-Hatiield resolution was
that we should do that. Let's stop now
and then talk about reductions. The
Jackson-Warner proposal, (sponsored by
Sens. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., and John
Warner, R-Va.) promoted by President
Reagan, responded to that by saying we
could only freeze after we had reached
"parity." So it meant, in effect, that
we would continue to rearm, calling it
by this misleading name "freeze proposal."
Millea: Another item in the mailing
says, "Still only a little before the his
toric August vote (in favor of a constitu
tional amendment tq balance the budget),
no more than 17 senators could be found
to support an across-the-board, 6J4 per
cent cut in federal spending . .
Walsh: (laughs) I think that blinks
the fact that the voting record shows
we are not cutting costs. We are trans
fering money from social programs into
armaments. There is no cutting, there
is only bloating. This year we are spending
as much on military activities as we spent
during 10 years of the Vietnam War.
Millea: One of the issues your candi
dacy brings to mind for me is the whole
structure of campaigns in the United
States. They're basically privately sup
ported. Do you think that people who
run for office should have to be sup
ported by financial interests?
Walsh: Our society is politically a
representative democracy and economic
ally capitalistic. We use the numbers of
people, politically, to offset the power of
money. When we have political leaders
who depend for the safety of their careers
on that money, we have a corruption in
that balancing process.
In the case of Ed Zorinsky, one of
the things that is most educational is
to look at his campaign contributors,
especially the PAC's (Political Action
Committees). You see the munitions
producers, defense contractors of many
kinds, tobacco companies, the rifle associa
tion and a lot of oil companies. What we
see, then, when we look back at his voting
record is that he votes for the military, for
tobacco subsidies, against new renewable
energy industries like solar, bio-mass,
wind, geo-thermal, etc.
In short, the funding of campaigns
is so much a problem that it is the central
power question in our society.
Continued on Page
