Lawsuits against SYATP.

[Ed Brayton]

Gary McCaleb wrote:

> If anything, ADF's "rhetoric" is understated in comparison the the 
> federal courts, which have bluntly told school officials that if they 
> can't teach the First Amendment, then its questionable whether they 
> can teach anything at all. 


I've read that sentence several times and I cannot for the life of me 
figure out what it means or what it refers to. If only our schools did 
teach the first amendment in the kind of detail it deserves. What on 
earth are you referring to here? What Federal court has told school 
officials that if they can't teach the first amendment then they can't 
teach anything at all?

> School officials are charged with knowledge of First Amendment law and 
> their students should not have to enlist the help of lawyers to resist 
> blatant viewpoint discrimination, which is at the heart of virtually 
> every one of the SYATP issues.

I certainly agree that school officials should be better educated about 
the law, and I get as frustrated as you do when I see that a principal 
or teacher has told a student they can't hand out religious literature, 
or can't read their bible during recess, or can't sing a Christian song 
in the talent show. When it comes to most such issues, I'm on your side. 
What I'm arguing, though, is that you feed into this ignorance by 
exaggerating what the court rulings actually say and by making the ACLU 
and other separationist groups out to be a boogeyman intent on 
destroying Christianity. As Kimberley Colby noted, one of the major 
causes of this thinking on the part of school administrators is that 
they think the ACLU is going to sue them if any religious expression at 
all takes place on school property. So it seems to me that what ought to 
be said in regards to SYATP events is not that you're facing down an 
opponent who thinks the event should be banned because it's 
unconstitutional, but that in fact virtually everyone, including the 
ACLU, agrees that such events are perfectly fine. That's how you ease 
those fears that, we all agree, might provoke an overreaction such as 
this. In all of those situations above, the ACLU is actually on your 
side. They have defended the right of students to wear religious 
clothing, to hand out religious literature, to sing religious songs in 
talent shows, to write about religious subjects for class assignments 
when appropriate, to pray on their own time during lunch or recess, and 
so forth. But you never hear anyone from the ADF or Liberty Counsel or 
the ACLJ acknowledge that. Instead, you all seem so intent on demonizing 
the ACLU with this very broad rhetoric suggesting that they'll file suit 
if anyone in any school utters anything vaguely religious, even on their 
own time, that their lawyers are going to swoop in and file lawsuits 
just because they hate religion so much. But that's not an accurate 
statement, and it certainly does feed in to the very fears that you say 
helps cause these incidents to happen.

>  
> Whether it is animus or ignorance we confront, it is still an 
> infringement of constitutional rights occurring in our public schools 
> on a national scale despite years of educational efforts and "simple" 
> resolution by students having the courage to seek out legal help. 


And my point is that the educational efforts are undermined by this 
overly broad rhetoric about the positions of your opponents. And 
further, that I think very few of these incidents are caused by 
anti-religious animus. Most of them are caused by ignorance and fear, 
and those things are made worse by the misrepresentation of your 
opponents and the exaggeration and distortion of their positions. I'll 
give you a great example. There's a case in Massachusetts where a group 
of students were told that they could not hand out candy canes with 
Bible verses attached to them at Christmas time. The school was clearly 
wrong. The ACLU sent a letter to the school principal explaining the law 
and the decision was reversed, and rightly so. A little while later, 
Jerry Falwell wrote a column about the incident (see 
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30443) in which 
he said, "The fact is, students have the right to free speech in the 
form of verbal or written expression during non-instructional class 
time. And yes, students have just as much right to speak on religious 
topics as they do on secular topics - no matter what the ACLU might 
propagate." This is the kind of outright distortion I'm referring to. He 
didn't mention that the ACLU was on the side of those students and had 
intervened on their behalf, he made it sound as though they are opposed 
to it. I realize that demonizing the ACLU is a powerful fundraising tool 
for groups like the ADF and Liberty Counsel, but these kinds of 
statements simply aren't accurate. Worse, they contribute to the problem 
that you claim to fight (and yes, I know that you're not responsible for 
Falwell's statements, but I only use them as an example. I think the ADF 
blog post I quoted to begin this exchange is a milder and less specific 
version of the same kind of exaggeration and distortion that I'm 
objecting to).

Ed Brayton


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