Oh, that's right -- it only applies if something Christian is brought into a public school setting. Non-Christian practices and indoctrination may be done in public schools with taxpayer dollars without any challenge at all.

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

Now would the New York Times be writing an article like this if we were talking about a program that brought the meditative techniques of Trappist monks into the public schools as a way of helping students focus, concentrate, and learn? No, we wouldn't -- we would instead get a blistering editorial denouncing the use of public schools for proselytizing. Left-wing groups would be up in arms, issuing blistering press releases about impending theocracy. And the ACLU would have a lawsuit in the works, complete with a gay, transgendered, atheist, illegal immigrant girl in a wheelchair who claims to feel oppressed as the lead plaintiff.

But since this is Buddhism, those same separationist folks are more than willing to pronounce it secular and let the program continue. After all, the Left likes Buddhism -- you know, the Dalai Lama is sort of cool,Richard Gere is a Buddhist, and Paris Hilton even took some Buddhist books with her to jail. it is only those awful Christians we have to watch out for.