Fun With The Establishment Clause
The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates y et again how useful it is. The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec. Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.” The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions”...