Eric Adams: ‘When We Took Prayers Out of Schools, Guns Came Into Schools’
“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams made a stunning admission at an interfaith breakfast:
At an interfaith breakfast Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams seemed to regret the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned school-sponsored prayer in 1962.
“When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” Adams said to applause from hundreds of religious leaders gathered at an annual event in Manhattan.
Adams was discussing the role that people who attend synagogues, churches, Sikh temples and mosques could play in reducing societal ills from homelessness to domestic violence.
“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies,” Adams said.
A mayoral spokesperson said after the event Adams “personally believes all of our faiths would ensure we are humane to one another.” The spokesperson accused reporters asking whether Adams did not support the separation of church and state of attempting to “hijack the narrative in an effort to misrepresent the mayor’s comments.”
“When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.”
— NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) speaking at the New York Public Library interfaith breakfast pic.twitter.com/2GkxKCB5bX
— The Recount (@therecount) February 28, 2023
The New York City Liberties Union criticized Adams and the rest of the speeches:
“We are a nation and a city of many faiths and no faith,” said NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman. “In order for our government to truly represent us, it must not favor any belief over another, including non-belief,” she said.
Except…Adams said prayers. The union knows other religions pray, right?
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There are a lot of changes that have been made in the past 70 or so years that fall into the same category: expulsions and suspensions of chronic disruptors, prayer in schools, fathers in families, corporal punishment in schools and families. My personal suspicion is that the one with the biggest payback would be to put fathers back into families.
Joe Biden is father to Hunter Biden. Just sayin’. 😉
But he ain’t shot nobody yet. That we know of, anyway. We can’t even blame him for leaving his gun next to the schoolyard, his bae did that.
Not all fathers do a good job, as you just pointed out. However, taking fathers out of families has had a huge, negative impact on the whole of society.
Prayers in schools, in particular bible reading, taught generations of students how to conjugate old-timey verbs. Today’s kids have no clue.
The actual function of prayer in school, and the pledge of allegiance, is to get people to stop milling around and pay attention. It marks the beginning of school discipline applying.
The star spangled banner has the same function at ball games. Self-appointed enforcers get the crowd to shut up and pay attention, a marketing stroke of genius.
Harnessing Karens for good. Clever, like capitalism harnessing greed for good.
Much more important, prayer acknowledges God. The greatest win of Progressivism was convincing people it wasn’t a religion, and therefore should push Christianity out of places like the schools.
Without a moral people there can be no self-governance. Which means the only way to have a stable nation is through a totalitarian or a technocracy.
The greatest fans of the Bible don’t believe in God. Harold Bloom, Derrida, Levinas, Jabes, Blanchot
Derrida, listen until about 27 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyOWAcpIaB8&t=350s
I would disagree that they’re the “greatest fans of the Bible.”
The depth of their appreciation would be a good measure.
His speechwriter knows how to play to his audience. Big deal.
Right message, wrong messenger
EVICTION NOTICE
to – Eric Adams
from – Democrat Party
Effective date – NOW
Reason – We have no place for God in our party
Like it or not that was the guardrail of society. I know that always upsets liberals but your current religion of Climate and entitlement doesn’t lay out how people are to act.
God as inhibitor. As you’ve said, our society does not benefit well when secularism greatly exceeds that of the religious.
All I’ll say to this is, “Yep!”
America is going to have to start rethinking this false progress, the sooner the better.
Many living today are devoid of the Spirit (Jude 1:19) and therefore are like unreasoning animals (1:10).
The book of Jude, just 1 short chapter, is a sobering read for these times.
I was also rather thinking first chapter of Romans.
Freddy Neech said it best.
Uh Oh. Adams will have trouble walking this back.
If he wants to, he won’t. It will be memory-holed just like every other time the left accidentally tells the truth then regrets it.
He’s talking sense and he’ll probably be expelled from his party for it. They have no room for sense, nor for a power higher than government regardless of what name you call it by.
No, dingleberry, there were plenty of guns in school when we had prayer in them.
It was not that “guns came into schools” but that the moral restraints on the people with those guns were removed. One of Progressivism’s greatest wins.
I’m pushing 74. We never ha prayer in any of my schools, and we did just fine.
Let the downticks begin.
I’m of a similar era, but don’t specifically recall formal prayers. However, a strong Irish Catholic presence in my public elementary schools (Italian too … and teachers & staff) so wouldn’t surprise me.
Do remember (~vaguely) discussions of the Ten Commandments, though. Seem like universal wisdoms, even inside governments.
We had prayer several times a day in mine. I don’t see that it made a serious difference.
What did make a serious difference is that if you screwed up, they kicked you out and made it stick. Not being a public school “required to take all comers,” they could do that. And that resulted in an environment where both sides could concentrate on learning, not on behavior control.
Always with the singsong phrases
I’d go with “problem guns” to capture a similar point.
I don’t think we can get the whole way rid of “guns” in proclamations like quoted. BUT, we can substitute an “equivalent” term, that frames things differently. “Problem guns” reads in that guns aren’t the problem, and that there were “plenty of guns” in schools in The Before Times.
It’s even more fun if they think at first yr agreeing with them.
State is the body, church is the heart.
No. The community – perhaps the nation – is the body. But not The State. This is the tell of his Progressivism.
Guns in the schools isn’t the problem. My high school had a rifle club, range in the basement, meets with other high schools. On meet days there were rifles on the school bus.
Here y’go, Snapshot from my HS yearbook
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhhardin/2439558798/
Same here. And, our best shooters were either our Hungarian refugees, or children of people who were guests of the German government.
Ours out here in the high school are the girls.
I have found that, for short-medium range shooting with a rifle it is far easier to get women to be good shots than men. Men seem to develop little problems and then not fix them while the women learn the form and practice it.
Not saying it is universal or anything like that, but it is a pronounced difference in my experience.
All the coaches I’ve talked to typically agree that the reason is that the girls actually listen to the coaching, while the boys often come with the attitude that they already know this stuff because they’re guys.
Fists, guns, scalpels, vacuums, drugs, etc.
A religion (i.e. moral, ethical, legal) for people capable of self-moderation. Competing interests to mitigate progress of others running amuck.
Yup. The problem isn’t “guns.”
“Teacher confiscates student’s Nintendo Switch during class. Student then attacks her, kicking and punching her, leaving her unconscious.” (video)
“Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens. History shows us – demonstrates that nothing – nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.
“Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the rest: of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.”
— Barry Goldwater
Excellent quote, Milhouse.
Wow. Nice find.
Ties to comments about govt, esp about Chicago, in today’s pile of threads.