Baccalaureate service - Political Correctness

Here we go again with some political correctness gone amuck.  Last week Cedar Cliff High School has sent a notice to parents and students that they will no longer host a baccalaureate service before graduation.  Gauging today’s intolerance for anything remotely religious it seems fitting that a standard tradition goes the way of the 10 Commandments and prayer in school further degrading our society and leading young people into the abyss.

The notice says that the West Shore School District received a complaint (imagine that) last summer that the program could cross constitutional boundaries separating church and state, since Cedar Cliff staff helped plan and hosted the religious ceremony in the high school auditorium.  One individual complaint is enough to once again scuttle a tradition that has been in place for years.  What seems to be different on this case from others is that the school district is actually planning and putting on the baccalaureate program.

When I graduated high school back in the 1970’s (from the liberal bastion of Lewisburg) we still had a baccalaureate program that was somewhat planned by the school but then held in Rooke Chapel at Bucknell University.  When my sons graduated from Milton HS, they each had the service held at a local church put on by the local pastors. Both services were voluntary but well attended.  The graduates that I talked to really thought the service was special.

Most schools in Pennsylvania stopped hosting the service several years ago and now Cedar Cliff is joining the group.  Pacificjustice.org from California says that schools can still hold the service in the host school.  Schools must turn over the interworkings of the baccalaureate program to a school religious club, a group of churches, or a single church.  There service can be still held at the school providing the group physically rent the auditorium from the school which is legal.  However, there are advantages to holding the service in an offsite location just to remove all appearance that the school has anything to do with it.

Nick Pantalone, student council president, said "I was shocked because it's been this way for such a long time," he said. "That's how society is nowadays. I guess I could see it coming, but I'm not happy with the results."

Unfortunately Nick is right.  There is always one party, one complaint, one disgruntled person that has to ruin a great school event just because there are religious overtones to it.  We are without a doubt marching to Gomorrah, make that running towards Gomorrah.  But you must ask yourself this one question – why doesn’t anyone fight to keep religious traditions going?  Administrators are so eager to throw Christianity under the bus in the name of being PC.