Oregon House votes to end ban on classroom religious garb

February 15, 2010

In a 51-8 vote, the Oregon House of Representatives has repealed a 1923 legislative ban on religious garb in the public school classroom. Prospects for passage in the state senate are uncertain.

The 1920s were a time of intense anti-Catholicism in Oregon in which the state’s citizens, deeply influence by the Ku Klux Klan and Masonic lodges, went so far as to vote in a ballot initiative to ban parochial schools (a separate measure from the law that banned religious garb). In the 1925 case Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ban on parochial schools. Pope Pius XI cited a passage from the Supreme Court’s decision in a footnote of his 1929 encyclical on Christian education:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty, to recognize, and prepare him for additional duties.

 

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Further information:

• House overwhelmingly says 'End ban on teachers wearing religious dress' (The Oregonian)
• Oregon Urged to Repeal Law on Religious Dress (Vatican Radio)
• Oregon History: Mixed Blessings (Oregon Blue Book)
• Pope Pius XI, Encyclical on Christian Education (Divini Illius Magistri)