Lawsuits against SYATP.

[Ed Brayton]

Kimberlee Wood Colby wrote:

> The DOE guidelines certainly have helped the SYATP situation, but 
> there are a lot of school administrators who are: 1) still afraid of 
> the ACLU, etc., filing a lawsuit if they allow any religious activity; 
> 2) haven't kept up on the developments in the law since they were in 
> education college in the '70s (and who can blame them); or 3) are 
> simply hostile to religion.  All 3 factors contribute to the annual 
> problems around SYATP.  But a problem nevertheless exists.

But it seems to me that if one is going to take the position that this 
sort of thing occurs because school administrators are so afraid of ACLU 
or AU lawsuits, then one obvious way not to encourage such reactions is 
to make it clear that the ACLU and AU are perfectly fine with this 
event. By using such general and exaggerated rhetoric suggesting that 
those bad anti-religious forces (and we all know who they are, wink 
wink) think SYATP is unconstitutional and want to stop it, doesn't that 
just encourage more of that unjustified fear? That's why such inflated 
rhetoric is dangerous. How many times have we all heard from TV 
preachers that the Supreme Courts "took God out of schools" (when in 
fact they only took mandatory religious exercises out of schools) or 
some similar rhetoric? It seems to me that the groups that people 
mistakenly think are opposed to this kind of event have been careful to 
say the opposite (as in the DOE document from 1995). And while I am in 
complete agreement with the ADF on both the constitutionality of SYATP 
events and the various ancillary issues (yes, teachers should be allowed 
to participate, and student groups should be allowed to promote it on 
the same basis that any other event would be promoted in the schools, 
etc), I think this kind of exaggeration only feeds into the 
misconceptions being identified as one of the causes of these 
unjustified restrictions.

I work with educators all the time and have for a long time. The vast, 
vast majority of teachers and school administrators are Christians 
themselves (like the general population) and certainly have no hostility 
to religious expression. Of the three factors you mention, #3 is almost 
certainly the least common. But #1 is what is being fed by these 
exaggerations. It's a shame that there are so many ill-educated 
educators out there who don't understand the law, but it certainly 
doesn't help the situation to turn every instance of a misguided 
principal needing a letter to fix his decision as an example of 
anti-Christian bias only feeds into the false perception that there is 
some vast anti-Christian conspiracy in schools to destroy all religious 
expression that has been supported by the courts.

Ed Brayton
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