Join us for our monthly chapter meeting!
AU Orange County Chapter invites you to join us for our monthly chapter meeting. We meet on the first Saturday of every month at Irvine Water District Headquarters at 15600 Sand Canyon Avenue, Irvine, CA 92618-3102. Our meeting starts at 1:30 PM and social starts at 1 PM. We look forward to seeing you there.
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Americans United for Separation of Church & State
Protecting Your Right to Believe... Or Not
Attention! Starting in 2012, we will be meeting on the first Saturday of the month with social starts at 1 pm and meeting starts at 1:30 pm.
March AU-OC Event!
Katherine Stewart The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children
March 3rd, 2012 at 1:30 pm with social starts at 1 pm
Irvine Ranch Water District Headquarters
15600 Sand Canyon Avenue
Irvine, CA 92618-3102
In January, 2009, Katherine Stewart learned that the Santa Barbara public elementary school her children attended had added a Bible study class called the “Good News Club” to its afterschool program. Stewart’s curiosity turned to concern as she discovered that the unstated purpose of the club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, is to convey the impression to its young members and their schoolmates that their school favors a particular form of the Christian religion. She soon learned that the Good News Club—a seemingly spontaneous and voluntary after-school program—was in fact part of a larger, calculated initiative by national advocacy groups whose declared aim is to “take back” America’s public schools and repurpose them with a Fundamentalist Christian agenda.
What happened in Stewart’s community is happening nationwide: at the end of 2010 there were more than 3,500 Good News Clubs operating in public schools across the country, and the number is rapidly increasing. What’s more, a landmark 2001 Supreme Court ruling not only permits such an unusual pairing of schooling and religion, it effectively makes it obligatory.