The Texas House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass Senate Bill 763, a delightful little assault on the Constitution’s Establishment Clause that Texas lawmakers think might have a chance to win approval from the Alito Court, which last year decided school prayer was just peachy as long as it conforms with the “history and traditions” of whatever the Court thinks the Constitution means in any given case. SB 763 will allow school districts to hire “school chaplains” to provide the services that would normally be provided by a school counselor, only without the oppressive educational and professional certifications required of counselors.
It’s a really short bill, too! It adds this new bit to the state’s Education Code:
SCHOOL CHAPLAINS. A school district or an open-enrollment charter school may employ or accept as a volunteer a chaplain to provide support, services, and programs for students as assigned by the board of trustees of the district or the governing body of the school. A chaplain employed or volunteering under this chapter is not required to be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification.
The bill also inserts a line that amounts to “and chaplains” to various parts of the education law discussing the duties of school counselors, including sections on providing mental and behavioral health support to students, as well as suicide prevention and intervention services. So when a student in a Texas school is in crisis, the person who they talk to might be a counselor with a master’s degree, extensive training, and a state teacher’s license, or it might be Volunteer Pastor Larry from the Potter’s House.
Texas actually does require fairly extensive training for school counselors who aren’t chaplains. They need to have a master’s degree in counseling — from an accredited institution, even — and two years of classroom teaching experience, with the teaching credential to go with that. Then they have to pass a state certification exam. On the other hand as SB 763 says, a “chaplain” needs no certification at all. Fortunately, even non-certified school employees and volunteers in Texas schools must be fingerprinted and pass a criminal background check, so there’s that.
For some reason, a whole bunch of fussy “civil liberties” groups like the Texas Freedom Network are opposed to this innovative solution to school staffing shortages and insufficient injections of Jesus into education. For that matter, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty isn’t so hot on it, either, even though SB 763 is sponsored by rightwing Republicans who insist it’s all about religious liberty and setting America back on the right path after all this wokeness.
Jennifer Hawks, associate general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee, even said stuff that sounds like it might come from some lawyer from the A-C-L-Yewww:
Religious instruction for Texas students is best left to houses of worship, religious institutions and families. Allowing Texas schools to hire anyone under the label of ‘chaplain’ to perform the work of school counselors threatens religious liberty by substituting an undefined religious title for licensed counselor. The goal of public schools is not religious indoctrination.
Hawks even said that if Texas schools need more counselors, it would make a lot of sense to hire more counselors instead of bringing in untrained pastors on the cheap.
The bill is being pushed by an outfit calling itself the “National School Chaplain Association,” whose homepage sports a diverse group of smiling children from stock photos, and which expresses very deep concerns about the challenges facing American young people these days:
Suicide, anxiety, and depression have reached epidemic levels in U.S. schools. Chaplaincy has proven to dissipate tension, resolve conflict and bring hope.
Who doesn’t want safe schools?
Well gosh, everyone wants safe schools! So what do the chaplains offer to address those problems? Whoo, doggies, the tone changes immediately with a turn of the mouse wheel, as the secular ills are answered with God and Country, timeless biblical values, and “prayer, counsel, and spiritual care,” which kind of sound like they’re all the same thing.
In some really eye-opening video, Rocky Malloy — the head honcho of the group, and also of the related “Mission Generation” — explains why schools should have chaplains instead of counselors. It’s all about using “the largest national network, the public school system, to bring Jesus to an entire nation.”
Hey, that doesn’t sound like school counseling at all! Who’d have guessed?! Malloy testified before the Texas House and Senate to share his ideas, although not all of them made it into the legislation.
Malloy explains that school chaplains will — at school districts’ expense — proselytize to school kids and staff, and bring “absolute truth” to counter all the crazy relativism in the schools, like the idea that trans people even exist, which they don’t, silly. In the second clip, Malloy explains that the First Amendment only means the state can’t sponsor churches, but churches are free to proselytize in schools, because chaplains “represent God, not religion.” Honestly, we’re going to need some case law on that.
The video doesn’t at all hide that Mission Generation’s goal is to use the schools to evangelize; none of your fluffy talk of merely supporting traditional values here. It’s all about bringing Jesus to millions of school kids, and how can anyone object to that without being a tool of Satan? In the video, Malloy even insists that volunteer chaplains won’t do, won’t do at all: They have to be on the payroll so they can’t be “at the whim” of school authorities. Sadly, it doesn’t look like he got that part of his unconstitutional wish. At least not this time around.
In other videos, Malloy explains that most chaplains for his group would only need a 48-hour training from Oklahoma Christian University and Focus on the Family to do their jobs, although people with no experience at all might actually need “30 credit hours” to qualify. But that’s only for his group, since SB 763 requires no training at all, so don’t sweat it. He also brags that his group “has a phone app” that covers pretty much all the issues a chaplain might need to deal with when counseling young people on matters like “suicide, you know, depression, whatever. So it gives you a biblical way to counsel or minister and pray with that child.”
We wish we were making that up. We are not.
Malloy then explains that ideally, the states that institute chaplaincy will make it a full-time position, so the chaplains can also spend time going through the libraries and making sure no “evil books” are in the collection. What’s more, a chaplain would be able to police teachers’ classroom collections and confront teachers: “Why do you have hardcore porn in a third grader’s room?” and I guess now I have no choice but to embed the video so you can see it for yourself.
The chaplain bill is just one of several bills intended to turn Texas schools into Christian institutions, if the Supreme Court lets the Legislature get away with it. Other bills would require every Texas classroom to display a poster of the Ten Commandments (just one version, specified by law), that must be “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom in which the poster or framed copy is displayed,” and presumably if teachers put a hat rack in front of it they could be fired or perhaps shot.
Another bill would set aside time for “prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious text” during the school day, but only with written parental consent, so it’s not forced, you heathens. The bill would mandate that if parents give such consent, they also would waive any right to sue on First Amendment grounds, so it’s foolproof.
The House sponsor of DB 763, state Rep. Cole Hefner (R), said it’s needed to give schools
“every tool that we can in the toolbox” to combat mental health problems and other crises. He conceded that districts could eventually replace all counselors with chaplains, and rejected Democrats’ amendments to require parental consent and that schools provide a representative of any denomination if requested by a student, teacher or parent.
Hefner also beat back a Democratic amendment that would have prevented taxpayer funds from paying for chaplains, explaining that “just completely messes up the purpose of the bill.” He didn’t clarify whether that purpose is to provide counseling, which it clearly doesn’t, or to bring the MAGA Jesus Gospel to kids in school.
Another Republican, state Rep. Brad Buckley, said that the Ten Commandments bill wouldn’t infringe on the rights of kids from secular or non-Christian families, since it only requires the posters be in every classroom, not that teachers instruct students about the poster that’s in every classroom. If a kid asks what any of the commandments mean, he explained, that would be “a great time for a teacher to contact a child’s parent.”
In conclusion, this is a great victory for Jesus and who really needs a Constitution when Republicans will tell us what’s legal and what isn’t, as need be.
[Dallas Morning News / Baptist News Global / Texas Freedom Network / Texas SB 763 / Texas Tribune]
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