Of all the cases cited by the article, this one worries me the most:

Last year, in writing an opinion upholding the right of an evangelical organization to distribute its materials in some New Jersey elementary schools, Judge Alito sought to distinguish the Santa Fe case. He said the Supreme Court's six-member majority had ruled that some students, like players and cheerleaders, were required to attend the games while others may have felt peer pressure to participate in the prayers.

But he said that distribution of religious fliers by the Child Evangelism Fellowship of New Jersey urging students to attend Good News Club meetings "would not result in any similar pressure to participate in a religious activity." Judge Alito said in his ruling that the school board had engaged in impermissible "viewpoint discrimination" in banning the evangelical literature because it allowed pamphlets from other groups like the Boy Scouts. He said that if the school board worried that people might think it had endorsed the religious fliers, "teachers could explain the point to the students."

I'm not so concerned with the legal issue. I happen to think Alito's right: if other outside groups such as the Boy Scouts are allowed to promote activities in public schools, then why shouldn't the Child Evangelism Fellowship?

What's really worrisome is the question of who represents values other than the conservative evangelicalism of such groups as the CEF.

As it happens, I'm familiar with the problem firsthand: my first church hosted a "Released Time" class--essentially Sunday School for public-school kids--and I sat on the program's board. We were allowed to run the program with the local school's assistance for the very reason mentioned above. Once a week, the kids were allowed to leave school an hour early for all manner of extra-curricular activities, and legally speaking, we were the equivalent of a gymnastics class or the Cub Scouts.

But it was a constant battle to prevent CEF-minded people from overrunning the program. We couldn't find mainline Protestants or Catholics teachers to save our lives, only extremely conservative evangelicals. I had to have a long discussion with one of them after I found her ranting to her class about Mary not being God, and telling them that Catholics were not "saved."

Another woman applied to be the program administrator. She actually worked for the CEF half-time, and brought their Statement of Faith to her interview, wanting us to subscribe to it before she'd take the job. She seemed surprised when I told her that Catholics would find the proposition that there was only one head of the church, Jesus Christ, to be offensive. She had assumed that since the statement was "non-denominational," it would acceptable in an ecumenical setting. We had some difficulty getting her to understand the two were not identical.

There's the core of the problem. Alito's ruling wouldn't be so worrisome were liberal Christians such as myself (not to mention Jews, Pagans, atheists and any number of other groups) able to think that our values would be fairly represented in the public realm.

We don't need someone like Alito to help conservative Christians ram their beliefs through our public system, and certainly, it's fair to ask that minority rights be respected. But who's to say that if worst comes to worst, and Alito's nomination is defeated, we won't have won the battle and lost the war?