WELL, OF COURSE:

What if Muslims in the community objected to a lesson about Christianity that demanded that students read the Nicene Creed out loud? Would the New York Times portray the Muslims as potentially violent? I don’t think it would. In fact, I think the NYT would portray the reading aloud of the Nicene Creed — “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty… And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God” — as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

The NYT quotes one of the parents as understanding the assignment to be an instruction “to denounce our Lord by copying this creed of Islam,” which is “an abomination” to her family’s faith and that the school had simply “cloaked in the form of multiculturalism.” And therein lies the problem. How do you know what the school is really doing? And quite aside from what the school meant to do, there’s the question of how it is perceived, which is an important part of Establishment Clause analysis.

Our various elites have gotten dangerously out of touch with the country. They are being forcefully reminded of this fact, and those reminders are likely to become more frequent, and more forceful, in the future.