Okie Jokie Trying to Force Prayer Video in Public Schools

Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters  is defending his decision to force his state’s public schools to show students a video in which he spews right-wing rhetoric and asks students to pray for Donald Trump.  Walters told CNN’s Pamela Brown that his video is following through on Donald Trump’s call for bringing prayer back to schools.

But even the state’s Republican attorney general says that Walters does not have the authority to force schools to show his video.  “There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video,” Phil Bacharach, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, told the Oklahoman. “Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights.”

Many of the state’s largest school districts aren’t showing the video, which seemingly violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state.  Oklahoma ranks 49th in the country for grade-school education quality, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Lawmakers in the state are slamming Walters for issuing the unconstitutional mandate to show his inappropriate prayer video.  “We’ve got such a deficiency in reading and mathematics. Those are the things that in public education, I think we need to be focusing on and not a culture war,” Republican state Rep. Mark McBride told a local Oklahoma news station

But rather than fund efforts to better educate Oklahoman kids, Walters is seeking to spend millions of the state’s education funding on thousands of Trump-endorsed Bibles for classrooms, which Walters is mandating be taught in all public schools for kids in grades five through 12.

It’s not the first time Oklahoma has gotten in trouble for trying to infuse religion into public education.  In June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision blocked a state policy to fund religious charter schools, saying, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian.”