Okay, first off, I’m going to link this story as a partial rebuttal to those posters who continue to claim that there isn’t a certain amount of anti-religion discrimination in the US, often associated with educational institutions. I’m not trying to claim it is organized, but I think it’s a bit of ostrich in the sand to claim that such doesn’t exist.
Now, on to the specifics of the case: I do not think that the school or district (as it appears may be the case) is in the right to include references to religion in its list of things it has banned from the yearbook. In spite of being better grounded in history than most people, I still object to the idea that religion belongs on the same level as references to drugs, alcohol, violence and gangs. Though I can see the argument. However, I really don’t see how a rewrite from “May God bless you” to “May He bless you” leaves the yearbook with any less a religous message. It’s not as specific, but the context, and punctuation, makes it pretty clear just what’s being said.
For that matter - you either take money to print an ad, as ordered, or you don’t. At the time of purchase negotiation is possible, of course. But you don’t change the ad after it’s been paid for.
This is not to say that I think the father mentioned in this article is being anything less than a jerk. For that matter, I doubt I’m alone in thinking he was hoping for something of this nature - I certainly wouldn’t have a phone number for The Pacific Justice Institute to call in case I felt my free-speech rights had been squelched, I’d go to the ACLU. (Which, as I understand their concerns and goals would be pretty likely to support his rights. Just not quite as willing to be an ass about it as he seems to want.) The proper restitution should be refunding the ad fee, maybe a little more. Not forcing the school to pay out $21K for reprinting the affected pages. Shit happens, grow up, and be an adult.
If the principle of witnessing is that important to you, offer to print up a flyer to be stuffed into the yearbooks, to be distributed with them. Personally, I don’t see how a specific “prayer” focusing on just one person could possibly be construed as witnessing, but that would be a Hell of a lot less jerkish than just trying to cost the schools money because you think you have them over a barrel.
I think that sometimes there’s a bit of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in these kinds of things. Unintended consequences, and all that. It can sometimes look pretty ridiculous, like in the Mozart movie when the Austrian Emperor had banned singing during ballet.
His majesty watched a rehersal, and was floored when Mozart’s opera went into complete aural silence while feet pounded their way back and forth across the stage.
Have the school refund the fee, with an extra $175 thrown in for the nuisance value for being dumb enough to run an altered ad without getting the client’s approval and be done with it.
I don’t know if the original ad would have been against the law or not. Probably. Certainly the wording shouldn’t have been changed without permission.
I think his money should have been refunded and a written apology given. If he wants to take it beyond that, let other Christians gather in court to be witness to the blessings that he truly wants for these young people: to take money set aside for their education. Heaven knows they have so much to spare. :rolleyes:
In 1957 I paid $3 for the yearbook. I saved three weeks allowance for it. It was a small yearbook since we were a small school with maybe 25 people in the graduating class.
Our yearbooks were $18. If you wanted the namestamp on the front, it was $23. Prices vary pretty widely. It just depends on where you go and what the payment system is. We sold ads pretty heavily and raised a lot of money that way, so part of what we earned went to defray the costs of the yearbook to the student body.
I graduated from high school in 2003, to put that in perspective.
If I give money to somebody to print a ad, and they change the wording without my approval, they would hear from me in good round terms. At the very least, I want a full refund of the price and a public apology.
They can take the $21K for reprinting out of the diversity budget.
Do most posters here consider Michael Newdow a jerk for filing suit against the Elk Grove Unified School District because of a religious dispute? They had to pay for lawyers too, you know. And I’m sure Newdow was happy to have the dispute all along, as he thought he might be vindicated in the end.
And I recently saw some girls lauded in some posts for saying the word “vagina” in a school speech presentation even though they had been warned not to do so. Were they jerks as well, and if they were, would this praise be misguided?
Disputes like this are going to happen, and through their resolution we establish the parameters of our liberty weighed against the rights of others.
Mine was about that much 15 years ago…so that seems about right.
Re-printing is the appropriate choice. I’m not sure if they will need to reprint the page (and glue it in) or if they’ll need to reprint the section (and glue that in). I know it happens enough that there are procedure for yearbook mistakes. Re-running the entire book is probably unnecessary.
There isn’t. What there is, is the occasional school administrator who doesn’t understand the law and becomes over zealous, not from anti-religion bias (most of them are religious themselves) but from misplaced fear of lawsuits or SOCAS violaton. The important thing to remember is that when schools make these kinds of mistakes, they are breaking the law. It is not institutionalized discrimination, it’s a lack of understanding and training about SOCAS laws. School adminstrators are no more immune to legal ignorance on these issues than anybody else. A large portion of the public (thanks in no small part to religionist demagogues in the media) still does not grasp the difference between what the 1st Amendment allows the STATE to do vs. what the PUBLIC can do. Deliberate attempts to misrepresent and obfuscate SOCAS (for example, by claiming that “students are not allowed to pray in school”) can sometimes have the reverse effect of teachers and administrators (who are overwhelmingly theist themselves) getting the erroneous idea that they have to police private religious activity or expression among students without understanding that the Establishment clause only applies to actions of the staff and the school as an institution.
The notion that there is a conspiracy of religion-hating “secularists” who want to stamp out Christianity is a total myth.
Incidentally, I wonder if the Pacific Justice Institute would have gone to bat for a Wiccan who wanted to recognize a “Goddess” instead of a “God.” Funny how you never see these CPC* victims ever breaking off the beer bottles to defend religions they don’t like.
*Christian Persecution Complex
I’m not religious at all. To my mind, changing “God” to “He” in the ad means that the school effectrively took a position on a religious issue. Either they should publish a personal religious message as submitted, or they should reject all religious messages. Changing a message, or being saelecxtive abut what kind of religious message they would publish, is (in my view) unconstitutional.
I don’t think the father is being a jerk, and the remedy that he asks for, of publishing the yearbook with his ad as submitted, is the only right one. (And I doubt this it would cost $21K – it could be done simply by printing a small sheet with the ad correctly worded and pasting it in every copy).
Diogenes beat me to it. There is not anti-religious conspiracy in schools; there are schools with ill-educated administrators who impose silly rules about student activities out of a misplaced fear of laws that do not exist.
The ACLU has a fairly impressive string of victories in suits filed against schools for suppressing personal religious expression.
Boneheaded and wrong move from the school. The suit is moronic, however - a refund and an apology, along with an effort to make sure this doesn’t happen again, should be enough.
PJI’s actions imply that the school’s error was an affront to God or the students who were deprived of the message (as if the revised ad could be read in a non-religious way) instead of a wrong against the father as an ad buyer.
In fact, the reality is that these so called religion-hating conspirators are often the very ones to DEFEND the rights of individual religious expression. What we generally get are religious administrators making bad calls against religious expression, then getting sued by SoCaS minded organizations supported by secularists. And almost all of the time, we win those cases too.
The ACLU has been so successful at this, in fact, that conservative culture-war organizations who want to paint the ACLU and other SoCaS defenders as being anti religion have made a concerted effort to form similar legal groups to poach these sorts of cases away from the ACLU.
Ha, so if I wanted similar published, and I was referring to Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and they changed it to a ‘He’…well, you get the idea.
But I am atheist and don’t want to ever have organized prayer in our schools and wish religious people would stop telling me how to live my life and still think this was a boneheaded thing to do by the school. Add me to the list of “an apology and a refund will be sufficient”.