Following the shooting in Parkland, Florida, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are coming together to invite God back into the state’s classrooms. A bi-partisan measure moving through the legislature in Tallahassee would require that the state and national motto – “In God We Trust” – be placed in Florida’s public schools.
The one-page bill is short, sweet and simple. “Each district school board shall adopt rules to require, in all of the schools of the district and in each building used by the district school board, the display of the state motto, ‘In God We Trust,'” reads the legislation, dubbed HB 839.
The measure passed overwhelmingly in the Florida House of Representatives late last week, with 97 voting in favor and just 10 voting against. The Senate has not yet taken up the bill. Interestingly, considering the current state of the national Democrat Party, which literally booed when God was added back into the platform after having been deliberately removed, Democrats largely backed the measure, too.
The sponsor of the bill, Representative Kimberly Daniels, a Jacksonville Democrat, said the purpose of the legislation was to have posters in schools that “remind our children of the foundation of this country.” Beyond looking at guns and safety, the “real thing that needs to be addressed are issues of the heart,” Representative Daniels added.
According to Daniels, she had a vision earlier in the week. “I believe it was God, and I heard a voice say, ‘Do not politicize what has happened in Florida and do not make this a thing of division’,” she was quoted as saying in media reports. Speaking of God, she said: “He’s not a Republican and he’s not a Democrat. He’s not black and he’s not white. He is the light. And our schools need light in them like never before.” Republican lawmakers who spoke with the Newman Report echoed those concerns.
In addition to being Florida’s motto, Congress passed a law in 1956 declaring “IN GOD WE TRUST” to be the national motto of the United States as well. If the U.S. Supreme Court tries to declare the Florida and U.S. motto to be “unconstitutional,” states should laugh at them, and Congress must immediately act to impeach the rogue judges for illegally usurping powers.
Before God was removed from the schools by two blatantly unconstitutional Supreme Court opinions in the early 1960s, mass shootings and suicides among children were practically unheard of in America. Drug use and illegitimacy were exceedingly rare, too. Today, those evils have all become commonplace.
And it should not have been a surprise – God and His Word are the only objective source of morality and Truth. God created man in His image, therefore human life has value. God commanded people not to murder, and therefore everyone has a right to life. But children are told they came from slime that turned into a monkey in some sort of giant cosmic accident.
Beyond that, God is also the source of peoples’ unalienable rights, a “self-evident” truth recognized by America’s founding fathers in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Without God, then, anything goes, including tyranny and mass murder, because neither freedom nor human life have any objective value.
While Florida lawmakers are doing the right thing, it is not nearly enough. It is the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a severed limb – without more urgent action, the patient will die. Instead, states across America should nullify the Supreme Court’s preposterous rulings purporting to ban God, prayer, and Bibles from schools.
Scripture says that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” If the Lord is not welcome at government schools, parents should remove their children immediately.
