Was the school properly upholding a Constitutional separation of church and state?
Or were they unconstitutionally discriminating against religion?
Or, neither?
Or both?
I note in prview that colon j has been replaced by a smiley. (that is, the symbol for colon followed by a j.)
Does anyone know how I can ddeal with this situation, when posting a link?
Moderator’s Note: When composing a new post there is a check box in the options below the text field, along with the “Email Notification” and “Show Signature” check boxes, called “Disable Smilies in This Post”, that you can select if a rogue smilie is popping up where he shouldn’t be. I went back and selected that option for your OP, so your link will now work.
Give the url an alias:
{url=http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtmlsessionid=YMMR3TG5XY1VQCRBAE3CFEY?type=topnews&StoryID=1265134}news article{/url}
becomes
news article
(with the appropriate substitution of square brackets for curved braces).
Alternatively, simply click the Disable Smilies in This Post box at the bottom of the submission window.
I’d have to say the teacher should have anticipated that if she asked the students to bring in readings about their “Christmas traditions” someone was bound to bring in a religious work. She should have either been prepared to accept that (while taking care to keep clear the distinctions between the beliefs of the different students and their families, and what the school was teaching them), or else she should never have made such an assignment in the first place.
The teacher asked 2nd graders to bring in books on their families “Christmas Traditions” and didn’t expect to see anything on the birth of Christ?
I don’t see how you can separate church and state when you specifically ask about a holiday that for millions of people is religious. I think the teacher made a mistake and didn’t realize it until the child started to share. Was this the first child to share that day? The article doesn’t say if there were any other “traditions” that were brought in that could of been deemed “religious”.
I think the lawsuit is going a bit too far. I would be interested to know how the parents “tried to resolve the issue with the school superintendent” though.
I notice that december’s original link is Reuters.
As biased as they are on religious matters, I think I will wait for another cite before commenting. 
Hmmm, I note with much amusement the similarity of this case and UNC’s decision to back away from requiring students to read a book about the Koran.
Are conservatives also upset about that case with similar fervor? Will december explain how this case is different, or is our indignity only reserved for Christian causes?
I’m being somewhat facetious – the causes between the two cases are obviously inverted, in one case the school objecting to a student bringing in religious material, in the other case the students objecting to reading religious material. Which doesn’t negate the above question in the least: are conservatives only interested in Christian causes and does ‘freedom of religion’ apply to all religions? Or just one?
Woo-hoo!! [cackling insanely]
Sam, honey, you’re worried that the Reuters article might be “biased on religious matters”? Check out the American Center for Law and Justice’s article–they’re the ones bringing the lawsuit, and guess who they are? They’re none other than Pat Robertson’s pet legal beagles, hot on the trail of all them going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket godless liberals, as represented by a second-grade teacher in Massachusetts:
http://www.aclj.org/news/pressreleases/020729_massachusetts.asp
Oh baby.
http://www.aclj.org/about/welcome.asp
Uh huh. :rolleyes: “Liberty” for the Christian, two-parent, marriage-bound family.
The mission statement’s a hoot, too.
http://www.aclj.org/about/abouta.asp
Sooo…I lost track of the OP, got so busy wiping right-wing froth off the front of the monitor. What was the question, again? “Is this lawsuit ridiculous?”
One vote here for “yes”.
BTW, anybody wanna sign the “Pledge of Allegiance” petition?
http://www.aclj.org/petitions/pledge/petition.asp
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!
[departs, cackling insanely]
I love the Internet…
This one I don’t have a problem with.
I would have a problem if the teacher, from her position of authority, were somehow imposing her religious beliefs on students. But not allowing a student to bring her religion into the classsroom? Seems a bit of a violation of the student’s rights. Speaking from an ethical and not a constitutional level – I know little about your constitution.
Not wanting to hijack the thread, but I’ve noticed that these debates in court battles about religion in American schools seem to follow extremely black-and-white lines. One side suggests that it should be built into the school system (“Under God,” posting the tern commandments, “Intelligent Design”), and the other side wants any mention of it banned, even if brought up by an individual student.
Is there no middle ground? When I was in school, my teachers often mentioned their religion, and could do so as long as they didn’t prosthelytize. And students felt free to bring up their beliefs in class and discuss it, as long as they didn’t try to impose it on people.
DDG Didn’t mean to confuse you.
december has bad-mouthed Reuters so much in the past {They’re anti-Israeli, you know. Pro-Palestinian).
I was trying to be humorous. Guess I should have tried harder.
I’m with dreamer.
Christmas exists solely because it commemorates the birth of Christ. Oh, I know about Saturnalia and all that re the timing of it, but the holiday itself makes no secret of its purpose. It’s the 2nd holiest day on the Christian calendar and to expect none of her students to mention Jesus when reporting on what they like about Jesus’ birthday is lousy planning. There’s plenty of wholly secular holidays out there if she wanted to do the project like that. And I don’t think a Jewish or atheist kid is going to be horrified to hear the kid’s report either–“Wait, Christmas and the Christians are RELATED?!” <faints>
Not that I want kids to bring in Chick tracts to class or anything, but really–unless the kid was up there listing the groups that were going to Hell because they didn’t believe in the Baby Jesus she was way out of line.
I think neither the Koran book nor the Christmas book are unconstitutional establishments of religion. Nobody is proselytizing. So, I guess, what Hamish said. Many panties in a wad over nothing - IMO.
The SCOTUS has been all over the map on this subject so I can understand why teachers are gun shy about religion. But what real harm can come from a frigging Christmas story? Or, to be fair, a book about the Qu’ran (spelling subject to change without further notice).
It is not likely that the SCOTUS is going to come to the school and open a can of judicial whoop ass on the teacher for making a “mistake.” But, it is a sensitive issue for some hypersensitive people. My theory: if you are not offended every day, you do not live in a free country.
by Hamish
As far as it goes, Most Americans agree with you, and this is the standard interpretation. The people who constantly bring these questions up seem to be the sort who can’t let the argument die. @$$holes, whether Christian or Atheist, are still @$$holes.
In this case, the Teach should hav thought more, the parents should have been more understanding, and the lawyers should have shut up.
I suppose when larger sections of counties and states had less variance in religion, this sort of question didn’t come up as much, simply because everyone was a Potestant, often all sharing the same church. So I can understand that a lot of people tend to get irked when others move in and later on demand big changes in how things are done, particularly since those suits tend to be brought by small minority groups in a given community.
Beagle The real reason there was a big stink about another school and the Quran was they were forcing kids in a particular class to wear Musllim robes (like you see in Mecca), read from the Quran, and in general teach them to be a Muslim.
IANAAmericanL, but my understanding is that the US constitution forbids the establishment of religion and in the same clause protects the right to practice religion.
Hence, in a public school, no student can be required to express religious beliefs, but not can he be forbidden from expressing religious beliefs (except in circumstances in which restrictions on speech would be appropriate. No student has a constititional right to shout “fire!” in the middle of a math class, when there is no fire, and no student has a constitutional right to preach a sermon during math class either.)
If a student is invited to talk or read about what Christmas means or how he observes it, it is plainly a violation of his constitutional rights to forbid him to express religious views.
However there is a prior problem; isn’t requiring students to talk about Christmas at all requiring them to express views on a religious matter? And doesn’t this violate the non-establishment clause?
Hmmm…? We must be talking about two different cases. The thread I linked to above was a discussion about this news story where UNC required students to read a book about the Koran as part of the university’s yearly reading program, and how the university bowed to pressure and dropped the book.
Do you have a cite for the ‘teaching kids to be Muslim’ story? I hadn’t heard of that case yet, and haven’t turned up any links. Thanks.
Oh, I was tyalking about a recent California school in the news for what I was talking about. Nevermind. I don’t think i recall the name of it… anyone have an idea?
It’s quite simple, actually. Though we live in a country where freedom of religion is guaranteed – and that means that the government cannot impose or, in general, restrict your freedom, not that people you find obnoxious cannot express their religious views in your presence –
There seems to be a vast conspiracy among school administrators to impose the Orwellian “everything not compulsory is forbidden” on all school students.
This is just another case of the same. I’ve made this point in response to numerous threads from the exact opposite slant over on the Pizza Parlor.
And I don’t know what to do about it – other than getting 50 state legislators to require that all school administrators be suspended without pay until they take and pass, by writing essay questions, a basic civics course on what it means to live in a free society! :mad:
Ah, here we go, I found it. . It took a while to sift through all the frothing fundie sites and find a straight news story.
Mehitabel:
If you know about Saturnalia, then why do you turn around and dismiss the very fact you just acknowledged? Because it inconveniences your argument.
Many of not most familiar holiday traditions, including ‘Christmas’ trees, wreaths, family feasts, exchanging gifts, outdoor lights, mistletoe, caroling, and Santa Claus (partly) are pre-Christian in origin. How can you inistst that the holiday is ‘solely’ about observing the birth of Jesus? It makes room for that aspect, but every individual has the right to determine which aspects are most important to him- or herself. A holiday is not one thing, it is 6 billion separate experiences.
Bit of a hijack, that.
As for religion in schools, here’s what is/should be allowed:
What is not/should not be allowed:
The case in the OP probabley doesn’t violates SOCAS but we can at least admit it comes close to the line.
Sorry, you’re right about everybody’s Christmas being different. But what I meant is that all the customs, no matter where they came from, have clustered themselves around a day which is in the western Christian calender as the birth of Christ.
The #1 that shouldn’t be allowed bothers me a bit–what if an Islamic student wants to demonstrate what the Koran sounds like in Arabic, or a teacher wants to demonstrate how the Catholic and Protestant versions of the Ten Commandments differ?