You’ve picked a couple of nits that don’t change the meaning of anything they said, Shodan.
Same difference. All the relevant points still apply.
I was speaking from personal experience of working in schools. Administrators are generally paranoid they’re going to break a law or get sued. They’re on eggshells all the time. I’ve seen it. I’ve also seen administrators who really had poor understandings of what SOCAS laws permit in public schools. I’ve had occasion to be an atheist teacher having to explain to Christian administrators that they wouldn’t get in trouble if a kid read a Bible during free periods in class. The principal in this case says they had (improperly) banned religious references in yearbooks because 'people have issues." I understand school administration code and I can tell you that means “parents call the school and complain or threaten to sue.” Administrators can be greatly influenced by only one or two phone calls and it ould only take one parent complaining about a reference to “Allah” to spook them into prohibiting all religious references in yearbooks, not because they are anti-religious but because they don’t want to get yelled at over the phone or have to referee fights between Christians and Muslims (it’s almost never atheists).
The OP used the words “anti-religious discrimination.” Tomato, tomahto. The point is that administrators are not biased aginst or hostile to religion. They’re just ill-educated sometimes and they live in fear of shitstorms.
No. The action of the parent was intended to make a point about a perceived suppression of religion. (That would be the point of the OP. Since the “no religion” ban had actually been changed prior to the lawsuit, but after the book’s galleys had been approved, the lawsuit is simply one more example of overly litigious American society and not actually pertinent to a discussion of SOCAS, it seems pretty clear that it was the now removed prohibition on religion in the yearbook that prompted the OP.)
Regardless whether it is a conspiracy or discrimination, it was the school that had already banned religious references
While no explicit mention of the purpose of the ban on religion was provided, the vague reference to
is consistent with the excuses generally put forth by those schools in the ACLU cases that they feared lawsuits or legal injunctions.
Are you arguing that there actually is no discrimination against religion in U.S. schools? It would be good to see you arguing the correct side of the issue.
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Why did they reverse the policy?
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The parent does seem to be, as mentioned, a jackass.
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I don’t see how changing ‘God’ to ‘He’ removes the religious context at all either. They should have been consistent and not allowed the ad at all, or made the parent submit an amended one.
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I largely agree with you (OP), but the religious being “lumped in with drugs and gangs” thing is a semantics argument. No one was implying that they have the same worth as concepts.
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Trying to force a school to waste $21K?? Considering the state of school funding problems that’s beyond fucked up.
Dio, I thought I made it pretty clear I wasn’t trying to claim that there any kind of conspiracy. I’m a bit miffed that you’ve made it sound like I am claiming there is a conspiracy, when I said in the OP, that there isn’t.
Looking over your argument, and what you’ve repeated in a later post, you seem to be saying that even though what happens, from time to time, is illegal religious discrimination, it can’t be characterized as discrimination because it’s being done from the best of intentions, and often by believers. I really don’t understand how that changes the effect on the ground, so-to-speak. You seem to be saying that, in effect: “Yes, it happens. But, since it’s not the result of a wide-ranging, all-powerful conspiracy, you can’t say it happens.”
I agree completely with everyone who’d said that the ACLU has an excellent track record of fighting for the rights of religious students in the schools.
I do agree, I too doubt that this Pacific Justice Institute would ever bestir itself to protect the rights of Wiccans, Muslims, nor any other non-Christian religion. (And I’d bet they’d be pretty leery of helping Mormons, too.)
I guess what i was saying was that there isn’t any legally sanctioned discrimination and there isn’t any anti-religious bias on the part of administrators (actually, I saw some unconscious, pro-Christian bias but that was it).
I also think that, technically speaking, order to call it discriminatory, you would have to show that these policies are applied unequally or that some religions are treated differently than others. Banning all religious expression in yearbooks outright may be illegal and stupid but it’s not technically discriminatory since it affects all religions equally.
Thanks, Dio. That was stand up.
I can see your view about religious discrimination, and, yeah, it’s certainly valid. I’m not sure I agree entirely - I do think that action by officials to try to remove all reference to all religion is still wrong, and I think it is an interference with free expression. Usually it seems simplest to refer to that as religious discrimination. But I suspect you’ve got the dictionary more on your side, there.
What does this matter?
If they have a good ironclad case, and win, then this case law then helps Wiccans, Muslims and others who also want to express individually their faith.
The motive of the plaintiff and their legal representation aren’t relevant here to me. What matters far more is whether they have a strong case.
It’s still disingenuous.
If I thought that it were a strong case, their motives wouldn’t matter to me.
For that matter, if I thought that the principle involved were at all worth fighting for, such as the previous blanket ban against all religious comments in the yearbook at all - I wouldn’t care for the motives of those behind the suit.
In this case, however, we’ve got an editorial staff so idiotic they tried to edit out reference to God from the ad, and left it just as much there as it had been before they interfered. To my mind that takes it out of the realm of suppressing free expression, and into the realm of simple breach of contract.
If that “He” for “God” is the only typo in that yearbook, I’ll eat it. You don’t reprint the whole book to fix a single typo. The return for all that effort is too small.
Refund the ad fee. Maybe a impose a penalty on the yearbook, too - to the size of the original ad fee, as Bryan Ekers suggested. That seems a proportionate response.
Forcing the school to pay $21K for an error of this magnitude just doesn’t seem proportional.
On preview: What Dio said.
It’s not always illegal. The circumstances (and complex interpretations of school law as it relates to the First Amendment) determine what is illegal. Unfortunately, what is legal is not always permitted and what is permitted is not always legal.
I agree with your point, but I don’t think that it would apply here. At least it doesn’t apply unquestionably enough to keep it out of the court system. Schools don’t have the money to lose cases; they don’t even have the money to fight cases.
The yearbook is funded in part by the state and distributed by the school. Therefore it is school sponsored. The ad itself (as it was originally written) was paid for by the parent. That does not relieve the school from being responsible for the contents of the yearbook that it distributes.
To make matters worse, this particular ad wasn’t paid for by anyone.
The religious discrimination that I saw during my twenty years in school consisted of things such as:
- A fundamentalist school administrator who ignored SCOTUS rulings and continued to have Bible readings over the intercom every morning and who had a temper tantrum when questioned about it in a faculty meeting.
(2) Several fundamentalist administrators who defied SCOTUS rulings and brought in evangelical and fundamentalist preachers who gave sermons and led prayers. (The schools included students from Korea, Cambodia, Turkey and India.)
(3) Harassment of those of us who did not support school sponsored prayer.
(4) Fundamental administrators making it difficult for teachers to be absent for Ash Wednesday and All Saints services.
(5) Prayers said at faculty meetings on teacher work days.
Absolutely! Not once in all of the years that I taught was I ever exposed to a workshop, faculty meeting, or faculty work day where school law on religious expression was the topic.
Yes.
You attempted to make two points. One was wrong; the other was reacting to a point no one had made in this thread.
You claimed that it was an action by a student, and underlined the word “student” to emphasize this. You were wrong about that. You claimed that there was no conspiracy, and no one had claimed that there was.
So a ban on religious references has nothing to do with SOCAS? That is one of those “too ridiculous to bother refuting” arguments.
The suit came about because the school changed the wording of the ad.
Not according to the article -
The article on which the OP is based is short, and easily digested. Therefore we can rule out the possibility that you made a series of honest errors.
Your post is obviously “a testament to ignorance or mendacity”.
Look, you argue in the same post that “there actually is no discrimination against religion in U.S. schools” and that there was a ban on religious references, and that this is not a matter pertinent to SOCAS.
You make an even more pathetic argument by claiming that "While no explicit mention of the purpose of the ban on religion was provided, the vague reference to
Quote:
people can have issues with it
is consistent with the excuses generally put forth by those schools in the ACLU cases that they feared lawsuits or legal injunctions." Could you please provide a scrap of evidence that the ban on religion in the yearbook in this case was motivated by what you claim it was?
Regards,
Shodan
What do you think the ban was motivated by, Shodan? Do educate all of us who have actually worked in public schools systems and know how things work. Do you actually think there is a “secularist” conspiracy to persecute Christians?
I can’t prove it, but I would be willing to bet that the ban was motivated complaints made by theists – either Christians complaining about non-Christian sentiments being expressed in the yearbook, or possibly Jewish or Muslim complaints about a perceived Christian bias. Complaints about religious bias almost never come from atheists, in my experience.
Shodan, do you have an actual point beyond twisting words to pretend you have a point?
My underscored reference to student activities was clearly a reference to the larger perception among some idiots that there is a general discrimination against personal religious expression in this country. It was not a direct reference to this case and your false statements about my post will not change that.
I admit that I picked up the word “conspiracy” from DtC’s post, but I used it in reference to the mindset of the same idiots of whom I have already posted who, claiming “discrimination” generally go on to claim that the imagined discrimination is part of some vast secular humanist conspiracy to suppress religion. (See Bill O’Reilly several times a month and most claims by WND and similar outfits.)
The ban on religious references in this particular story has to do with a general ban on things that make the school administration uncomfortable–which I speculate (based on watching numerous similar cases in the past) is based on a misunderstanding of what is required by the law.
A ban on religious references tucked in among a number of other prohibitions of things that the administration deems uncomfortable is not a direct effort by the government to ban religion and is not really a SOCAS issue. The only thing “too ridiculous to bother refuting” is your misinterpretation of the events. The “action of the parent” was, indeed, intended to make a point about the perceived suppression of religion. Your selective quoting does not change that.
The ad was taken out to honor the student.
The editors (stupidly) changed the text, based on the previous rule that banned religious references in the yearbook.
The rule prohibiting religious references was changed between the time that the ad was accepted and changed and the time the actual yearbook was printed.
The “action of the parent” is the demand that the original ad be reinserted into the yearbook at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars for which he went to a
Now, the suit was (ultimately) brought about by the change of the ad, but you were responding to my statement regarding the intention of the OP. Since the rule had already been changed, all subsequent publications by that school will not be subject to any ban on religious statements. Since the OP explicitly mentioned “anti-religion discrimination” in the opening of the OP, the topic (as I noted) was religious discrimination, not, as you pretend, the current lawsuit.
If you want to pretend that the only issue, here is that the of “action of the parent” to place an ad, or if you wish to pretend that you are fighting for truth and justice by nitpicking my remarks (while getting all your nitpicks beyond the word “conspiracy” wrong), go ahead and pretend that, but you are beginning to look pretty silly.
This is a public school? I really don’t understand how that could be in keeping with the SC rulings. I am far from being well-versed in that law, but how can a public school be free to publish religious statements? They certainly aren’t free to sponsor events where they are spoken aloud. This is not making sense to me.
The statement was in an ad sponsored by a third party in a yearbook. The school is simply accepting text in an ad, not making a statement by the administration.
Do you really want schools to reject an ad that says “Congratulations Joe, God bless you. Mom & Dad” on some trumped up claim of SOCAS? (That was not the actual text of the disputed ad.)
The government can provide open forums from which people can express any sorts of views, even religious, as long as they are open to all views. That’s perfectly in line with SoCaS. Just as the government can build a public streetcorner from which someone can preach from, they can finance a yearbook on which students are given the ability to express themselves, or people to buy ad space saying whatever they want.