I don’t know who said that, but the family didn’t try to prevent anyone from praying. What happened was that the father tried to prevent his daughter from standing with them while they prayed, even though she was (until he freaked out) content to stand with them and wait quietly as a show of solidarity with her team. People are making up a whole bunch of shit to shoot at, and are saying that I said things I never said, like that I was blaming the victim, or that I thought I knew more than anyone else, or that I favored Christians over atheists. Dumbass shit like that. Meanwhile, you compared her to people who endured one of history’s most terrible oppressions with your usual flippant disregard for balance and perspective. So instead of trolling for fights over imaginary statements, why don’t you just listen to what is actually being said?
That was sarcastice, which is why “ostracize” was in quotes. The same post said that it was a ridiculous choice of words and explained why. No one was ostracized. What happened is that her father yanked her around for his own purpose, which was to make a political statement about his beliefs.
How do you know this? I saw the YouTube video last night, and I didn’t take it like that at all. I think you’re making an awful lot of assumptions here. It sounded to me like the girl was perfectly capable of making decisions for herself, and stated that she stayed out of the prayer circle out of respect for both herself and her teammates.
What happened next was students, teachers, and the community in general shunned her. And you want to blame that on the father? Please explain how you came to this odd conclusion.
Once again, explain how you know this to be so.
The father IS a victim. He was physically assaulted by the principal (a jury agreed unanimously that the principal was a liar). The local sheriff tried to hire somebody to do him physical harm and conspired to tamper with witnesses and suborn false testimony. He was threatened with a false prosecution for assault if he wouldn’t leave the state. What does it take to make somebody a victim in your book?
And where do you get this crap that he’s “manipulating” his daughter? In what way? Do you assume that no teenager can really be an atheist unless they’ve been brainwashed? Well I was a teenaged atheist and my parents were both theists. It’s funny that you don’t accuse any of the Christian parents of manipulation. I guess all Christian faith in teenagers is completely sincere and independently derived and has nothing to do with parental influence, huh?
Comparing him to Phelps is ridiculous. The father hasn’t tried to hurt anybody or mess with anyone’s rights or to 'use" his daughter in any way. He was pissed about how she was treated, as well he should have been. If a teacher had told a Jewish girl "this is a Christian country, if you don’t like it you can leave,"would you accuse her parents of being Phelps-like for being upset about it?
Obviously you do because you’re defending it. The adults in this town were not only encouraging their kids to ostracize and harrass this girl and her family but actively joining in the harrassment.
I was being facetious, Lib. You accused the girl of “ostracizing herself” by choosing not to join in a prayer circle. I had never seen such a clear instance of victim-blaming from you.
The 20/20 segment was biased against the family. The more digging you do on this story, the more damning the evidence is against the town.
But just to be fair, can you name one specific thing the father asked from the school that you thought was unfair? saying he went “apeshit” or the like is not really an answer. I want to know what kind of demand he made from the school that you thought was unreasonable.
What happened was that the girl felt uncomfortable standing in the prayer circle and decided ON HER OWN that she didn’t want to do it.
Not that it particularly matters. The school still had no right to retaliate against her with faked up allegations and harrassment, REGARDLESS of why she stopped standing in the circle. The school had no business involving itself with the religious practices of its students, PERIOD.
Those from the “other side” refused to comment. Odd, that, being that they’re all good Christians who did nothing to be ashamed of.
OK, there were a couple of comments. The one that made me headdesk is the woman who said “I don’t really know what atheists are, but whatever god they worship is not the one I worship.” The ignorance runs deep, the ignorance runs strong.
Lib is going to read this as “Blah blah blah, dad’s a jerk.”
You think so? I thought it was pretty neutral but leaning towards sympathy for the family. But it was extraordinarily incomplete.
It was the incompleteness that I thought was biased. On the surface, it seemed mildly sympathetic to the family, but it left some stuff out and I thought it was silly for the interviewer to demand that the father justify his atheism. Change “atheist” to “Jew” with an interviewer asking the father to justify his refusal to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah and how would that have come off?
May I refer you to the following:
It has been stated once by you implicitly, and once by Shodan directly, that the girl/family/father wants the other kids to stop praying, or at least that that is the logical implication of this “shit-stirring.” And, beyond these two direct quotes, it’s pretty clear from your line of argument that you believe that there is an alterior motive to end prayer; I find it kind of ridiculous that you’d claim otherwise.
Instead of backpedaling over things you’re claiming to have not said, why don’t you just listen to what you’re actually saying?
People would be just as pissed off as they should be in this case, of course. But in some ways, it’s a bad comparison. The populace in general sort of understands Judaism. They are, by and large, staggeringly ignorant about atheism. That people are asking questions at all is somewhat heartening. Maybe the country can at last get an education.
By the way, Lib, your accuasations that I have an anti-Christian bias are groundless. I have a problem with a school harrassing a kid for her beliefs regardless of what they are. I send my own daughter to a Catholic school, for whatever that’s worth to my credibility. She not only prays in school, she attends mass there once a week. I WANT her to have a religious education. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. As hard as it may be for you to believe, I would have the same reaction if a Christian kid was harrassed at an atheist school (if such a thing exists…a more likely scenario would probably be a Catholic or Jewish kid being harrassed at predominantly Evangelical school).
Once again, because I saw him speak. It was all about his own perceived struggles. He even sat in on her interview, coaching her. When she cried, he didn’t hug her, he patted her on the back! He called the town’s people “a gang, a religious gang”, even though four of them from the local church, when interviewed, said that Christians should welcome atheists, and that no one should treat the girl badly. They weren’t at all predisposed against atheists, confessing that all they knew about them was that they didn’t believe in God. Meanwhile, the father said that “the school is conspiring basically to run the atheists out of town, or at least get them out of the school, simple as that.” I don’t think he ever said anything about her. All he talked about was why God doesn’t exist and what meanies all the faithful are.
And now, some questions from me…
If he cared for her and was half as smart as the thinks he is, then why did he ever subject her to all this to start with? What the hell was he thinking when he moved his family to Bumfuck Population 300 right in Middle America? Do you think for one second that he did not KNOW that his daughter would feel out of place in the little school? And why didn’t he raise hell when she was playing football with the boys? They were all still Christian, but just didn’t gather for prayer before games. And why didn’t he encourage her to stand with the girls at basketball games, without praying, to show team solidarity?
It was just very hard to tell from her interview, with him hovering over her, just what was true about her experience and what wasn’t. She didn’t even know why she was an atheist, other than being born into her family. Probably the same as most of the other kids born into Christian families. There was no indication from anything in the piece to suggest that she couldn’t have gotten along had her father not made a stink over it.
(It was, by the say, a John Stossel piece which, interestingly, seldom gets good play on this board.)
That was a question to you, the posters here, not a question for the girl. What pissed her father off was that the kids were praying at a school function, violating, according to him, the Constitution.
Anyway, my heels and y’all’s heels are all pretty well dug in on this, so there’s no point in discussing it any further. I’ll defend any atheist who is “abused” by Christians (which is what the OP said), but that didn’t happen here. Personally, I think it’s pretty much like this thread. Y’all aren’t abusing or ostracizing me; we’re all just saying what we think. And I hope nobody hates anybody over it. (But Dio, you really need a big perspective pill, not just for this but for almost every issue you post about.)
So do I. When that happens, let’s have a thread about it.
“I’m Baptist most of the time, but ten days a year I have to go visit Grampaw Fyodor, and I have to pretend I’m Russian Orthodox while I’m there!” :dubious:
My problem is that you’re being dishonest in order to try to make this about something other than small-town bigots.
The 20/20 article made clear that the problem occurred at the FIRST basketball game, when Nicole declined to join the group prayer. There was no problem when she played football, because there was no issue with group prayer. You’re making up this whole idea that the father is some sort of Machiavellian Svengali who is abusing his daughter to make some sort of political brownie points. I see absolutely nothing that supports this idea, and much evidence against it.
I live in Oklahoma. I’ve dealt with Oklahoma Christians and Oklahoma small towns. I have some idea of how things work here. Do you, or are you just talking out your ass because you’ve got a stick up your butt about this for some reason?
As I’ve said, many small-town Okies are very good, very nice people who are unfamiliar with non-Christian beliefs. A few of them are bigoted assholes. However, the nice people often will simply not recognize religious bigotry because of their restricted worldview. I’ve dealt with this on many occasions, in conversation and in actual practice. I see evidence of that happening in this situation, based on comments by the townfolk.
And, unfortunately, as is true with most humans, the average citizens will often turn a blind eye rather than fight their neighbors - especially when the object of oppression is a “foreigner”. As in many rural communities, it can take generations to move from “foreigner” to “neighbor” status.
You may not be explicitly saying “anything bad about atheists [or] atheism”, but you and Shodan are discounting my experiences and the experiences of other Okies in order to insist that YOU are the only ones with true understanding of the situation. Those of us that have lived the situation are just “the Usual Suspects” “joining the circle around the wagons” and “making shit up”, because only the two of you know what’s really going on.
That’s offensive and annoying. So I called you on it.
Liberal, you’re making yourself look like a jackass. Read the article. It talks of plenty of examples of harassment of the girl by teachers and students, including her being told BY A TEACHER BEFORE THE CASE WAS BROUGHT that “this is a Christian country, leave if you don’t like it”. It has quotes from the girl on her own atheism, and so on. They’re suing in response to the harassment and expulsion of their daughter on fabricated terms, not as an offensive action against the prayer.
Fair enough, and I follow your logic. It was nothing more than an annoyed reaction to clicking on your link for the background story and just getting the Google search page. Nitpick withdrawn with apologies.
Excellent point, and one that should be illuminating to everyone. Students do have free exercise rights. They do not have the right to coerce. And they most especially do not have the right to use the school administration or law enforcement to coerce, which becomes an Establishment Clause issue at that point.
It’s up to the school (administration) to ensure that that balance between free exercise and no Establishment Clause coercion is met. And that’s their affirmative duty under law.
Watch the show.
Except that it isn’t true. They offered (1) to let her stand with the girls, without praying, for team solidarity; (2) to let her stand away from the girls while they pray; and (3) to let her go to the locker room while they pray. What other choices are there?
Heaven forfend! He patted her on the back! Did it occur to you that he may have been trying to be unintrusive during a television interview? You’re reading an awful lot into one small moment.
Well, the town DID engage in intimidation, threats and attempted physical violence against him. I also wouldn’t put much stock in what some church goers said on camera. I wouldn’t expect them to say what they really thought to a television camera.
Well that was pretty much substantiated at trial. He was threatened with a false prosecution for assault (and the jury agreed that the allegation was false) if he didn’t leave the state. The sheriff tried to hire somebody to do him physical harm. The school and the sheriff conspired to tamper with witnesses and concoct more false allegations against him. What more does it take for a family to feel like it’s being run out of town?
He was getting badgered to justify his own lack of belief and answered the questions. he didn’t say “all” the faithful were assholes, only the ones who were harrassing his famly.
He has a right to move anywhere he wants. Who cares why he wants to move there? Would you call a black father an asshole for moving his family to an all-white community?
What a bizarre question. Why should he have a problem with his daughter playing sports with Christians? Are you saying that if he had complained about his daughter merely playing football with Christian teammates (and no coerced prayer), you would have been on his side?
Because a.) She didn’t want to, and b.) religious beliefs and practices have no bearing on team solidarity.