REAL ART SUPPORTS
RELIGIOUS LIBERTIES

Even though I've devoted a great deal of column space here to speaking out against religion's intrusion into the public sphere, I very firmly support people's freedom to worship or not worship as they see fit. Occasionally, I join with my strange bedfellows on the religious right in their outrage against bizarre anti-religious policy.

Case in point, this story from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Schools' rules on religious candy canes assailed

A religious liberties law firm accused Plano school officials today of violating students' constitutional rights by forbidding them to hand out candy canes and pencils with religious messages on them.

Attorneys with the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute said they planned to file a federal lawsuit claiming the district has an unconstitutional censorship policy that victimizes students.

And

Last week, Plano school officials sent a letter home requesting that parents not send their children to school with anything green or red this holiday season, Sasser said. All cups, plates, napkins and icing must be white or the children violate the district's policy, he said.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, this is kooky.

Keeping religion out of the schools means prohibiting teachers and administrators from proselytizing, from leading students in prayers and whatnot. It does not mean preventing students from doing such things themselves (indeed, savvy fundamentalist public school administrators have employed this angle in order to get around the first amendment's "establishment clause" by referring to graduation ceremony and pre-game prayers as "student initiated," even when they are not). Students clearly have the right to be or not to be religious.

The first amendment both keeps government out of the religion business and guarantees the individual's right to express his or her spiritual self. It's not that hard to understand. Sadly, school officials in numerous instances since the famed Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s which abolished the widely spread practice of school sponsored prayer have hypercompensated by making all religious manifestations forbidden. It sounds like that's what's going on in Plano. I guess they're simply afraid of legal entanglements: however, that doesn't excuse such rank violation of guaranteed freedoms; they've certainly got legal problems now.

The sad thing is that the administrators responsible for such bone-headed policy are probably pretty religious themselves--Plano is not unlike the neigborhood in northeast Houston where I grew up, Kingwood, which is wealthy, conservative, and generally pretty Christian. I imagine that, even though they don't approve of it, these guys don't understand the prohibition of school prayer to begin with. Actually, it's probably because they don't approve of it that they don't get it. To them, it's just another attack at religion, instead of a protection of religion. Compelled by law to implement a rule that they don't understand, they screw the whole thing up. In the long run, crap like this simply gives the separation of church and state a bad name.

I always used to delight in declaring to my students when I was teaching high school in fundamentalist Baytown that, even though I am not religious myself, prayer and religious debate were completely welcome in my classroom as long as it was during down time. Sometimes, stunned fundamentalist kids would be like "that's cool, but won't you get in trouble?" which always opened up the opportunity for me to give a mini-lecture on the first amendment. It was a win-win situation for me as a progressive educator: religious kids felt like they were getting away with something, which made them overlook the potentially controversial fact that I was telling them why it was so important that school sponsored prayer remain forbidden.

Anyway, this Plano thing is just ridiculous. Students have a right to distribute religious messages at school as long as it is non-disruptive. Apparently, the courts agree. Again from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Judge allows 'religious viewpoint' gifts in school

A federal judge ordered today that Plano public schools allow students to distribute "religious viewpoint gifts" to classmates at holiday parties scheduled for Friday.

The order by U.S. District Judge Paul Brown in Sherman came a day after four families filed a federal lawsuit accusing the district north of Dallas of banning Christmas and religious expression from their children's classrooms.

Click here for the rest.

Anybody surprised that I would take such a position forgets a simple fact: the same right that allows religious people to be religious also allows me to be not religious. Like I said, it's not that hard to understand.

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