Connecticut School Board Removes "Lord" from Diploma as They Should Have

The school board of New Haven, Connecticut was correct to have the language "in the year of our Lord" removed from high school diplomas. The concept is explicitly Christian and official documents should be religiously neutral. This is not in the same spirit as banning posting the Ten Commandments, for instance, which can be examined in its universal not just spiritual context other other activities that reflect religious aspects to our culture which do not explicitly attempt to impose upon or interfere with the religious practice of others.

Naturally, there's the usual religiosity of some conservatives who attempt to establish that the United States is truly a Christian nation in the assertion that the founding fathers were devote Christians who leaned upon their Christian faith to establish our country's founding principles. That is a false representation of history as there was significant religious diversity from Catholic and Protestant points of view to those of Deists. The assertion that they were not men of faith and representing Deism as almost interchangeable with agnosticism is equally false as asserted by many secular humanists.

The bottom line is that the inclusion of "year of our Lord" serves no purpose other than to explicitly recognize Christianity, and that is not what a country devoted to religious freedom is about.

We will continue to discuss these issues as they come up. Over the long haul, surely we will weigh in more consistently against the forces who seem to think that "freedom from any public religious expression" is what our Constitution's first amendment intends.

Of course, private and religious oriented schools are free to use terms like "in the year of our Lord" as they see fit, and if students who attend those schools don't like the practice, maybe they should question why they enrolled in such a school in the first place. A Muslim student at Trinity College in San Antonio, Texas petitioned for the removal of this phrase. In this situation, one has to wonder what a practitioner of Islam is doing attending a Christian School in the first place.