Gary McCaleb wrote:
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? 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.
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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