Update on the Declaration of Independence Story

It's looking more and more like the story is nonsense. According to the actual complaint filed, the principal did not ban the Declaration of Independence, but told him he could not hand out a list of excerpts and quotations that included one excerpt from the Declaration. Apparently what the teacher did was find as many excerpts as he could that referred to God and handed them out to his students, the type of absurd list put together by Christian Nation apologists like David Barton. Seeing the Forest has been following this story and has links to all the others who have been following it as well. Also see the information from Liz Ditz and Majikthise.

More like this

It turns out that our suspicions were entirely correct and Steven Williams, the teacher in Cupertino, California who is suing the school district because the principal requires him to get her approval before handing out any supplemental material to his class, is one hell of a proselytizer. Here is…
Our fevered friends at StopTheACLU have issued a "Code Red Alert" because the ACLU is trying to get the courts to allow people of different religions to be able to swear on something other than the Bible when taking an oath in court (they don't have specific links, so you'll have to scroll about…
There is an e-mail making the rounds with a set of arguments alleging to prove that the US is a "Christian Nation." The entire e-mail was taken directly, word for word, from this webpage: http://www.errantskeptics.org/hold_quotes_2.htm, which was in turn taken from an article in Worldnetdaily, and…
Jon Rowe has a post linking to this article by Dave Daubenmire, a guy whose sole credentials are that he once coached high school football. Now, I remember taking classes from the coaches in high school. I remember having to explain econometric formulas to the baseball coach who taught economics,…

This isn't surprising. I have found it not unusual that, when all the facts come out regarding a case like this, there is usually far less than was originally reported. Largely because the original report was probably based on kvetching by someone who has an ax to grind--in this case the teacher--who got hold of a sympathetic--or maybe just lazy--reporter. If it weren't for the teacher's kvetching, the story would never have seen the light of day.