Child's choice of religious subjects in public school c

[Michael McConnell]

Mark Graber writes:
>
> Well, one might note, as I often do, that the first amendment
> contains a free exercise clause for speech, but both a free exercise
> clause and an establishment clause for religion.  This hardly settles
> matters, but it may suggest that people have reasons for disagreeing.

This is exactly the position that I was criticizing. The
child's choice of reading materials is either deemed
to be his own choice (in which case the free speech clause
applies and the establishment clause does not--not even in
the soft version that makes "endorsement" a pedagogical
concern), or deemed to be attibutable to the government (in
which case neither religious nor secular readings enjoy
constitutional protection, and the whole matter should be
governed by a combination of politics (for secular speech)
and the Establishment Clause (for religious speech)). To
treat the speech as the child's choice if it is secular but
as attributable to the school if it is religious is simply
incoherent.

(This is the same issue we debated, in a different guise,
in connection with the lesbian teacher in the Utah school.)
-- Michael McConnell (U of Utah)