Gamber explains why the Quaker should not be a public school’s mascot.
It’s time for the Moorestown High School and the middle school to change their mascot altogether. No religious or ethnic group should be the mascot of a public school, especially not the Quakers. No only is the mascot comparable to cultural appropriation, but it also crosses the line that separates church and state by inadvertently promoting a religion.
Our mascot does not honor Moorestown Quaker heritage. Instead it perpetuates misconceptions about Quakers. At every high school football game, cheers along the lines of “fight quakers fight” can be heard from cheerleaders and attendees. Imagine the outcry if we cheered for Catholics, Lutherans, Jews or Muslims to fight. What’s worse is that quakers are historically pacifists. It would be an easy fix to simply stop the cheers if this was the only example of misrepresenting the Quaker image, but it is not. Instead the very mascot is a caricature. It is a whitewashed, overly aggressive, and dated misrepresentation of what Quakers were historically and are today.
Most importantly no religion should be the mascot of a public school. Not just because of cultural appropriation but because of our nation’s founding principle in the separation of church and state. In 1962, the Supreme Court decision of Engel v. Vitale official ruled that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools.
While a Quaker mascot might not be a school sponsored prayer, courts have repeatedly supported that the U.S. Constitution prohibits public schools from promoting or proselytizing religion to children in any way. It doesn’t matter if we are merely “honoring our Quaker history” because that history being cited is of a specific religion. If having a religion as a mascot at a public school does not promote religion, I do not know what does.
Elijah Gamber
