Valedictorians and Jesus

[Apos]

@Shodan

Well, it’s part of it.

No, it isn’t. If the issue is purely on whether or not the school can prevent someone from speaking about religion in an open forum, then the issue is clear and the school has no leg to stand on. But that’s not the argument of the school, so it’s not the point in contention. The question is whether the school has any valid argument that it was doing something else. If it doesn’t, then obviously it has no ground to stand on. However, acting as if it doesn’t, or that its argument is other than it is, is just attacking a straw man.

True. It also cannot be in the business of preventing certain kinds of non-disruptive speech, and not others. That would be an interference with the free practice of religion and/or free speech.

Yes, but again, not the argument in question here. If that was the schools argument, then they would lose: the ACLU has argued several cases on this very point.

Keep in mind that the valedictorian is a private citizen, and the schools are agents of the state. The state has restrictions on it that a private citizen does not.

Indeed: but the question is in what capacity is the valedictorian acting. Is she being given an open forum, or is she part of an official state program?

I agree, that’s pretty offensive, but a lot more directly and personally than someone attributing their success in school to Jesus.

Indeed. Though if I’m not mistaken, the student did more than smply acredit her own success to Jesus: she asked the students to keep Jesus in their hearts as well, and this was only the start of the speech the school ha nixed. Remember that the school has a policy that allows religious invocations at graduation as long they are personal. They clearly thought her alternate speech, which we don’t know much about but we do know got into citing Bible verses, talking about the crucifixtion, and so on, was more than merely crediting her faith in god with her success.

Again, if I were the school, I don’t think I would have put the kibosh on it: I would have just openly declared that the valedictorian has an open forum and be done with it. But the school clearly didn’t do that: they got involved to the point where they found out that she was going to urge the student body to pray to Jesus, and then put her on after an agreement that she would not to do that.

However, there are limits to even that. Should the valedictorian be able to deliver a sermon? What if they simply read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to the class verbatim? If you agree with me that that probably isn’t appropriate, then you agree that the call is not so easy to make, and the argument that this is just a free and open forum is a little questionable. If anything goes, why can’t I single out the Jews and condemn them and pray for their souls?

Not to nitpick, but I don’t believe you could characterize the school’s action as selecting a student in order to deliver a religious message.

Not in this case, of course not. But in the end, in practice, we can generally never really know why any school selects the program it does. The best we can do is find out if they knew beforehand what they were arranging.

The problem comes in when the school begins to pick and choose certain types of non-disruptive speech that it will allow and some it will forbid. That becomes content-based censorship, and the schools as agents of the state have no business doing that.

Again, that’s arguing against a straw man. If the school was doing that, and if their other arguments fail then game over for them. However, they argue otherwise, so you must deal with those arguments instead of attacking the easy target.

Sort of a catch-22, isn’t it? Make the student agree not to exercise her rights. If she keeps the agreement, she has lost her rights. If she doesn’t, then she can be banned from exercising her rights for breaking the agreement.

You could say the same about a preacher who his hired explicitly just to speak about something in a non-secretarian manner, but who then veers off into condemning homosexuals. Catch-22? Violation of his rights if the school cuts his mike?

Again, you’re too glibly arguing with the straw man position here. The argument of the school is that this wasn’t an open forum, but was rather a program they knew about beforehand and were responsible for. What you should be arguing about is whether that excuse is valid, and if it is, what the limits of that rationale are.

[saoirse]

@Revenant Threshold

I’ve got a question, which isn’t for anyone specific, but I think it’s an interesting parallel. Would you be accepting of a Valedictorian whose speech consisted of him or her saying that they owe their success to their drinking a huge amount of alcohol during their time their (and not as a joke), or them having slept with a wide variety of complete strangers they picked up from bars the night before exams?

Well, the drinking and the bars would certainly be promoting illegal behavior, unless the child was held back three times. National 21 drinking age and all.

[Clothahump]

@cosmosdan

I think we can go to far trying to walk a tightrope of seperation of church and state. Of course the student can’t say anything he or she wants so I do think the school has a right to some screening.

If the sudent wanted to thank God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha, Thor or anyone else for helping them I think thats acceptable. To approach it in a way that suggests what others should believe is another matter.

“I want to thank my Lord {insert diety} tonight for helping me to get here”
acceptable
“We all need to thank {diety} and make {diety} the focus of our lives”
unacceptable

Sorry, I have to disagree with that. Both forms are unacceptable in the scenario described. If she wants to thank whatever Invisible Friend In The Sky she thinks got her there, then she can do so in the play palace built for that particular IFITS. If she’s in a public school funded by our tax dollars, she should keep her religious delusions to herself.

[constanze]

Here is an interesting account from a Christian why public prayers don’t belong in schools, or school-sponsored events.

Let me start by saying I am an evangelical Christian and have pretty hard-core beliefs about the rights of individuals, particularly students, to express their faith…
You might be surprised then to learn that I am adamantly opposed to teachers and other school officials leading students in prayer or the conduct of prayer rituals, even by students, at officially sanctioned events.

…I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer. But to our extreme dismay, the clergyman who took the microphone and began to pray was not a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest, but a Buddhist priest who proceeded to offer up prayers and intonations to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan.

…To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Protestations about the student’s free speech rights are a red herring. That’s not what’s at issue. What’s at issue is what the school is allowed to say and that includes people who are speaking as agents or representatives of the school. A Valedictorian is speaking on behalf of the school at the behest of the school and so anything she says carries a tacit endorsement from the school. In addition, there is also the issue of whether the school has a right to force other students to listen to religious speech as a condition of attending their own graduation ceremony (and there’s really no difference in my mind betwen proselytizing and “thanking God.” Both kinds of religious speech are obnoxious if unsolicited and neither should have to be endured as a condition for receiving a diploma).

The bottom line is that when a Valedictorian makes a religious speech, then she (and by extension, the school) is making religion part of the ceremony. That’s not ok.

One thing I think we might all be able to agree on is that all Valedictory speeches tend to be tedious and boring and that maybe we’d be better off dispensing with them entirely.

[Shodan]

@Apos

Indeed. Though if I’m not mistaken, the student did more than smply acredit her own success to Jesus: she asked the students to keep Jesus in their hearts as well, and this was only the start of the speech the school ha nixed. Remember that the school has a policy that allows religious invocations at graduation as long they are personal.

This is why the right to proselytize is important as part of this case. Saying that you can talk about your religion but not recommend it to others is a violation of free speech and freedom of religion.

The right to believe for yourself is neither more nor less protected than the right to recommend to others that they believe. The state, and its agent the school, can no more protect one but impede the other than they can decide that you are free to vote for whoever you want but not advocate that someone else vote the same way. All the rights under the Constitution are protected.

Again, if I were the school, I don’t think I would have put the kibosh on it: I would have just openly declared that the valedictorian has an open forum and be done with it. But the school clearly didn’t do that: they got involved to the point where they found out that she was going to urge the student body to pray to Jesus, and then put her on after an agreement that she would not to do that.

Distinction without a difference. The schools don’t get to abrogate anyone’s rights by declaring some of its assemblies to be “open” and others not subject to the protections of the Constitution.

It seems pretty clear that this valedictorian was not acting as an agent of the school. She is a private citizen, selected for an honor based on her achievements, and, to some degree, expected to describe the basis for her success and to act as an example to other students on how they can achieve. Then they discovered that they didn’t particularly care for the reasons she was going to give for her success, or the recommendations she was going to make for other students. So they tried to censor her speech. If she wasn’t going to disrupt the assembly, then they can’t do that, no matter what they claim their motives were.

“Look, we don’t have anything against blacks, but their presence tends to be disruptive. So we have a policy where our graduation assemblies are not open forums. No blacks are allowed to talk. Sorry.”

See the problem?

However, there are limits to even that. Should the valedictorian be able to deliver a sermon? What if they simply read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to the class verbatim? If you agree with me that that probably isn’t appropriate, then you agree that the call is not so easy to make, and the argument that this is just a free and open forum is a little questionable. If anything goes, why can’t I single out the Jews and condemn them and pray for their souls?

I don’t think so. Anything doesn’t go - only that which is not disruptive. Singling out members of the audience for condemnation could certainly be construed as disruptive, and could be argued against on that basis. If you want to argue that recommending Jesus in your heart is as disruptive as telling some of your fellow classmates that they are going to hell, go ahead, but most people will be able to see the distinction.

Not in this case, of course not. But in the end, in practice, we can generally never really know why any school selects the program it does. The best we can do is find out if they knew beforehand what they were arranging.

Right, and make the judgement based on the effects of what they want to do. In this case, the effect is to implement content-based censorship. Which is verboten, under Tinker.

However, they argue otherwise, so you must deal with those arguments instead of attacking the easy target.

Well, if their arguments are “this isn’t an open forum”, that is pretty weak. It was a public assembly. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Once the school opens up to any kind of non-disruptive speech, they are obligated to respect all such speech, even if they don’t like it. Trying to pick and choose “I like this kind of non-disruptive speech, but not that, so I will outlaw that” is out ab initio.

You could say the same about a preacher who his hired explicitly just to speak about something in a non-secretarian manner, but who then veers off into condemning homosexuals. Catch-22? Violation of his rights if the school cuts his mike?

Two things -[ul][li]If the school hired him, it is much more obvious that the preacher is acting as their paid agent. There you could stop him, providing you could get around the “ceremonial Deism” exception that the courts talk about. I would bet condemnations of homosexuals wouldn’t qualify for the exception, especially if it was found to be disruptive.[*]The valedictorian was not hired, and under no obligation therefore to say what the schools wanted. [/ul][/li]

Again, you’re too glibly arguing with the straw man position here. The argument of the school is that this wasn’t an open forum, but was rather a program they knew about beforehand and were responsible for. What you should be arguing about is whether that excuse is valid, and if it is, what the limits of that rationale are.

It isn’t valid, for all the reasons I have already mentioned. If the school is responsible for it, then the school is acting as an agent of the state and is obligated to respect the rights of the students. Read Tinker.

Regards,
Shodan

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

If the school is acting as an agent of the state (and it is) then it cannot force its students to endure religious speech speech as a condition of attending a school ceremony.

[John_Mace]

@Diogenes the Cynic

If the school is acting as an agent of the state (and it is) then it cannot force its students to endure religious speech speech as a condition of attending a school ceremony.

In your humble opinion, that is. I agree that a school official should clearly state that the speech represents the views of the individual involved, and not that of the school itself. Just because a valedictorian invokes his or her personal deity in the speech does not mean the state is establishing a religion or favoring religion over non-religion. The state, in this case, favors neither. However, I also don’t see why the school can’t, if it so chooses, restrict the speech to certain topics (ie, do not condone illegal behavior). It’s just a valedictorian speech, not a mass baptism.

Forbidding religious speech in a valedictorian speech cannot be justified in terms of origional intent of the constitution, not in how reasonable people would interpret the constitution today. I again look at this test: Would we ever have passed an amendment with the establishment clause if it said: *Nor shall any student mention religion in a valedictorian speech in a public school. * I think not. So, do our laws mean what we the people and our legislators think they mean, or do we divorce that decision from ourselves and let some group of 9 individuals decide that in a vacuum? The latter would be appropriate if our laws were handed down by God, but they aren’t-- they’re made by us.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@saoirse

Well, the drinking and the bars would certainly be promoting illegal behavior, unless the child was held back three times. National 21 drinking age and all.

Not so. By the time of graduation, most students would be over 21. And since graduation is only open to the graduating students and parents, no lower year students will be promoted to.

[Frelling_Tralk]

@Oakminster

Would you be willing to sit there at your child’s graduation, and listen to the Valedictorian say something like “Hail, Dark Spirits who rise from the shadows of the night, we acknowledge your dark power and revel in thy evil. Slay the Christians, and aid us to drink the blood of their babies to the greater glory of Cthulu”.

I have a new goal in life: to get my daughter to become valedictorian, and then say those words in her speech.

[Frelling_Tralk]

The valedictorian was not hired, and under no obligation therefore to say what the schools wanted.

I don’t know what school you went to, but the public high school I attended had plenty of ability to place restrictions on how we behaved, including what kinds of speech were allowed. I got a book of rules at the beginning of each year - which included restrictions on dress, behavior, and speech. High on the list of restricted speech was swear words. Students were regularly sent home for violating the dress code. My brother was suspended for a day after the school principal discovered that he had snuck several veiled sexual references into a cartoon he did for the school paper. We were checked on our way to the graduation ceremony to make sure that we were appropriately attired under our gowns, because the school had a problem a few years prior with students going commando. All of that was perfectly within the rights of the school to do, in interest of keeping order.

By your logic, the valedictorian could get up and spew out a string of swear words and the school should have no problem with it.

That said, I would have no problem with a valedictorian saying something like “one of the things to which I attribute my success is my personal faith.” I would, however, take issue with the valedictorian getting specific about that faith or encouraging others to follow it.

[Frelling_Tralk]

@Revenant Threshold

Not so. By the time of graduation, most students would be over 21. And since graduation is only open to the graduating students and parents, no lower year students will be promoted to.

College graduation, sure, but at high school in the U.S. most are 17 or 18.

[JThunder]

@Oakminster

Seriously. Would you be willing to sit there at your child’s graduation, and listen to the Valedictorian say something like “Hail, Dark Spirits who rise from the shadows of the night, we acknowledge your dark power and revel in thy evil. Slay the Christians, and aid us to drink the blood of their babies to the greater glory of Cthulu”.

Exactly how saying “Slay the Christians, and aid us to drink the blood of their babies to the greater glory of Cthulu” analogous to something like “Thank you, Jesus”?

[saoirse]

@JThunder

Exactly how saying “Slay the Christians, and aid us to drink the blood of their babies to the greater glory of Cthulu” analogous to something like “Thank you, Jesus”?

Both express an opinion on the importance of Christianity in one’s life.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

They both amount to endorsements of a particular religious view.

[magellan01]

@Frelling Tralk

By your logic, the valedictorian could get up and spew out a string of swear words and the school should have no problem with it.

Vulgar speech can be banned. The same way it can be banned in a school newspaper. But religious speech isn’t necessarily vulgar speech. If someone wishes their speech to be both vulgar and religious it can be banned on vulgar grounds, but not religious ones.

Now if you’re of the mind that religious speech = vulgar speech, that is a different debate, one that I woldn’t waste my time with.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Frelling Tralk

College graduation, sure, but at high school in the U.S. most are 17 or 18.

You have big graduation ceremonies for high school? You wacky Americans!

[Apos]

@Shodan

This is why the right to proselytize is important as part of this case. Saying that you can talk about your religion but not recommend it to others is a violation of free speech and freedom of religion.

See how quickly you jumped into the straw man almost right away again? Very tempting, I know, but really not very helpful.

The right to believe for yourself is neither more nor less protected than the right to recommend to others that they believe. The state, and its agent the school, can no more protect one but impede the other than they can decide that you are free to vote for whoever you want but not advocate that someone else vote the same way. All the rights under the Constitution are protected.
Distinction without a difference. The schools don’t get to abrogate anyone’s rights by declaring some of its assemblies to be “open” and others not subject to the protections of the Constitution.

On the contrary, when a public school prepares a mandatory official ceremony for students, it has an obligation to make sure its as religiously neutral as any other. If this student had been urging students to join Allah, all of the students and parents upset about the girl being cut off would be screaming bloody murder. You can claim that you’d be okay with it, but that’s just a convienient pose and not particularly reaslistic, and we both know it.

I don’t think so. Anything doesn’t go - only that which is not disruptive. Singling out members of the audience for condemnation could certainly be construed as disruptive, and could be argued against on that basis. If you want to argue that recommending Jesus in your heart is as disruptive as telling some of your fellow classmates that they are going to hell, go ahead, but most people will be able to see the distinction.

Except that “keep jesus in your heart” was only the start of the prepared speech. We don’t know exactly what it was that the school expected after that, and given that she’d already lied about her intentions, it might be reasonable to expect some more stuff as well.

Well, if their arguments are “this isn’t an open forum”, that is pretty weak.

Another super powerful “seems to me” declaration from Shodan. Why do we even need a system of laws when you are around to tell us how things seem? This is in fact the schools argument, but hey: at least you are addressing it in some passing fashion rather than fishing for red herrings. Bravo.

Once the school opens up to any kind of non-disruptive speech, they are obligated to respect all such speech, even if they don’t like it. Trying to pick and choose “I like this kind of non-disruptive speech, but not that, so I will outlaw that” is out ab initio.

Not in the case where the school argues that IT is ultimately the one directing the ceremony and running things.

[magellan01]

@saoirse

Both express an opinion on the importance of Christianity in one’s life.

But that’s exactly the larger point: “in one’s life”. (emphasis mine) Therefore it is not the school make a religious proffession, but ONE individual.

@Diogenes the Cynic

They both amount to endorsements of a particular religious view.

See above. A religious view that is being endorsed by an individual.

[magellan01]

Let me ask this? The valedictorian is interviewed by the school newspaper. They ask her how she managed to be so successful. Two thirds of her answer explains how important her faith and her personal relation with Jesus has been in her life. Should they print it> Why? Why not?