June 12, 2000
Baptist family opposed to football prayer feels pressure
___By Kenny Byrd
___Associated Baptist Press
___SANTA FE, Texas (ABP)--Debbie Mason grew up in a Baptist church believing in the separation of church and state. Years later, she has learned that standing up for that conviction can carry a price, even with fellow Baptists.
___Mason and her four daughters found themselves on the minority side of an emotional dispute over prayers at high school football games inTexas.
PROTESTERS hold up signs opposing pre-game prayers at Santa Fe Independent School District football games last fall. "Just because I don't pray Baptist does not mean I don't pray," reads one sign. (Photo by Nicole Fruge/Galveston County Daily News)
___That dispute is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices will decide by the end of June about the constitutionality of the Santa Fe Independent School District's policy allowing varsity games to be kicked off with prayer.
___Lower courts have struck down the policy, which allows a student elected by peers to give a "message" or "invocation" at varsity football games. While the Masons are not among the parties challenging the policy in court, they have vocally opposed it. As a result, they said, they have faced harassment and threats.
___"If you want to make enemies, if you want people to hate you, stand up for separation of church and state," said Mason, a homemaker who grew up attending a Baptist church in Michigan.
___"This isn't a bad community," Mason said of the 9,000-population Texas town where she moved several years ago. "A lot of people here are nice, but some people in the churches have made it hard for other people."
___When Mason's daughter Jennifer was 17 years old, a local school board member--speaking from the pulpit during the worship service of a Santa Fe church--described parents who opposed the school's policy as "dim-witted" and "bored" housewives with a "void" in their lives.
___"I was in shock. I started to cry," remembers Jennifer Mason, now 22 and a reporter for a newspaper in Alvin.
___Mike Lopez, the school board member who made the remark, recalls the incident. "I'll stand by that statement," he said. Opponents of the prayer policy enjoy "taking the opposite view on everything that the town decides to do," he said. Many people in the town refer to families who oppose football prayer as "CAVE people--Citizens Against Virtually Everything."
___Court documents cite several incidents where students from minority faith groups were treated harshly by the school district. For example, one teacher told a Mormon student his religion was a "cult."
___Lopez said the Masons and others have exaggerated stories about religious coercion in schools.
___"I can't understand how a 30-second prayer offered up in the name of Jesus Christ can so traumatize a child beyond repair, yet that same child can go see graphic violence in R-rated movies and be OK," he said.
___But Mason said her family's unpopular stance has jeopardized their employment, health and friendships. Her husband, a contractor, no longer can get work in the town. Mason has received threatening phone calls, and people have followed her home from town and tried to scare her.
___"And it's all in the name of Jesus Christ," she noted ironically.
___Mason said her daughters couldn't find jobs in Santa Fe.
___"We've been called 'anti-prayer' and 'anti-God,'" Mason said. During the height of the harassment, "I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown."
___On more than one occasion, her daughters came home crying, she said.
___One daughter was diagnosed with an illness that a doctor said was caused by stress and anxiety. Mason said the girl finally admitted "that some kids had been pushing her up against the wall, tripping her and saying, 'You don't believe in God.'"
___"Kids can be mean," she said. "A lot of the children who were doing this were fromtheir own church."
PROTESTERS display signs with a message of separation of church and state.
___Mason said her daughters were called "devil worshippers" for refusing copies of the Bible being passed out in school.
___Mason said people would confront her at school board meetings and say: "You're one of us. You're a Baptist. Why are you doing this to us?"
___She would answer: "Because I am Christian. Because I am Baptist."
___Mason, who moved to Santa Fe from Flint, Mich., said Baptists "down here believe differently than what I learned as a Baptist in Michigan."
___She began attending a Baptist church in Michigan at age 6, when her parents went through a messy divorce. At church, "I found out Jesus loved everybody."
___While her mom was working two and three jobs, "I just felt no one cared or knew I was there," she said. But "I knew Jesus was there. He was sitting there beside me when I cried myself to sleep."
___As she got older, her church taught her about the necessity of separating church and state.
___Most people "don't think about the fact that someday they may wake up and will not be allowed to be a Baptist by their government," she added. "Our forefathers had enough insight to know that we would get back to the same problems they faced, and they wrote a Constitution to help us do the right thing."
___Mason said she was ecstatic after discovering the Baptist Joint Committee, a religious-liberty watchdog group in Washington, had filed a brief against the Santa Fe prayer policy. "I cried when I heard it, because not many people had been helping us," she said. "I was thrilled that a group had done it. I was even more thrilled to find out it was a Baptist group."
___Baylor University's J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists joined the BJC effort.
___Mason said it has been painful to see her children be hurt by their church and fellow Christians. Two of her daughters have turned away from organized religion altogether because of the experience.
___"This school board will never know the pain they have caused my children," Mason said.
___Mason said she and her husband let their children choose their own faith. "They went to every church in town and always came back to the Baptist church," she said. Mason said that choice "made them stronger when it came to their faith, and it made them stronger to be able to speak out when people of other faiths were being hurt.
___"But now, they won't go near a Baptist church," she said.
___Jennifer Mason Simonis explained that before the lawsuit, her church friends would sit with her in worship. "But then after, it was like two different churches. It caused me to question my faith."
___When asked if she will leave the small Texas town, Debbie Mason quickly replied, "I'm not moving. ... I think fate has put me here to fight this fight."
___She is perplexed by those who ask, "What harm is a prayer?"
___"I guess their religion doesn't matter much," she reasoned. "Has religion become so commercialized that it's become 'just a prayer?' I think prayer means more than that."
___With additional reporting by Regional Correspondent Ashlee Ross
___
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