Carnal Reason

When C.D. Hylton High School’s marching band performs during Friday night’s football game, they will be playing a different tune.

This year, the marching band is performing a Georgia-themed halftime show, to celebrate their upcoming trip to perform at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta in December, band director Dennis Brown said. Until recently, the Charlie Daniels Band song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” was in the marching band’s line up of Georgia-themed music.
…
On Oct. 2, The Potomac News & Manassas Journal Messenger published a letter to the editor arguing that while no one objected to that song about the devil, there would be objections if the band were to play a song about God or other spiritual beings.

After that letter ran in the paper, Brown dropped the song from the marching band’s program. “We did play the song at one game, because our theme was ‘Georgia on my Mind,’ ” Brown said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Then we read Mr. [Robert] McLean’s letter to the editor and we have since dropped it from the show.”

In the letter, McLean wrote, “A high school band director would be fired for playing ‘Amazing Grace’ but no one bats an eye for the playing of a song about the devil … [H]ow can one mention the devil, and not be able to mention a Christian God?”

Potomac News, via Ravenwood’s Universe

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, I suppose. The bar of theocracy has been set so low that even indirect reference to religion (Islam excepted) is presumed to be the imposition of a state religion. How pathetic.

Posted on October 17th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General, law, politics, religion