When her request became public, her neighbors organized protests that boiled over on to local talk radio. "What people here are saying is, 'Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,'" radio host Dan Gaffney told his listeners. Soon, what could have been settled amicably and with tolerance escalated into a lawsuit. Mrs. Dobrich, feeling threatened by angry telephone calls, sold the house and moved to nearby Wilmington. She sued the school board for damages. To paraphrase lyrics from "The Music Man": "You got trouble, big trouble, right here in the Indian River School District."
The Founding Fathers, most of whom were men of faith, bequeathed a government that separates church and state, protecting each of us in his or her faith (or in no faith at all). The minister at Samantha's graduation ceremony confused a commencement ceremony with a Sunday morning worship service. "Ultimately, [Jesus Christ] is the one I have to please," the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church says. "If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow Him."
Fair enough, but if Mr. Fike felt he could only preach a sermon at the commencement ceremony, the school board should have invited another minister whose convictions would enable him to preach the Gospel from his pulpit and deliver another message at a public-school commencement. Mr. Fike's insistence on doing it his way only divided the community. After a season of controversy galvanized the town against the Dobriches with protest meetings and angry letters to the editor of the local newspaper, one of Alex's classmates gave him a drawing of a pathway to heaven that excluded the "Jewboy."
Differences and misunderstandings become bigotry when an inflamed majority abuses the weak in its midst. Intolerance never lurks far beneath the surface, and snubs and slights can activate prejudice and intolerance, public and personal, and it becomes particularly insidious when a religious leader plays to the mob. Tolerance requires vigilance.
My mother was proud to become an American, in a place where she never again felt isolated for being Jewish. She often joked that in America she could have her chocolate cake and eat it, too. So should we all.