I forgot to discuss this last week, but the Supreme Court denied cert in the case of Baldwinsville School District v. Peck, a church/state case involving a kindegarten student's right to express a religious viewpoint. The class was given an assignment to draw a poster with their perspective on the environment. Antonio Peck drew a poster that showed the earth with people holding hands around it on one side and a picture of Jesus on the other side. When the pictures were put up in the school cafeteria for parents to see during a conference day, the teacher put up Antonio's picture but folded over the paper to hide the picture of Jesus.
The school claimed that it would violate the establishment clause, which is clearly absurd. The family filed suit, had the case initially dismissed, then remanded, won at the district level, won a 3-0 decision at the appellate level, and last week the Supreme Court refused cert and let the 2nd circuit ruling stand. I wish they had taken the case just so they could affirm it, as there is a good deal of confusion over student religious expression and this would have been a good case to clear it all up with.
The suit was filed by Liberty Counsel, a group that is almost always on the wrong side - but not in this case. By any existing establishment clause standard, there is no way to make a credible case that a picture drawn by a student and part of a larger display of student artwork could possibly be construed as an establishment clause problem. This is precisely the sort of administrative overreach that feeds into the paranoia of the religious right for no reason whatsoever.
It's patently absurd that the school ever took the case to court in the first place. They should have apologized to the child and agreed not to censor student religious expression in the future. Instead, they fought tooth and nail, filing an appeal that they were clearly going to lose. And now, undoubtedly, the Liberty Counsel will be getting legal fees awarded as the law allows. Of course, we won't hear a peep from the anti-ACLU crowd that always complains about legal fees being awarded in such case. But like the Dover case, the plaintiffs are rightly and legally having their legal expenses reimbursed for challenging an unconstitutional policy in court.
In fact, the halfwits at Free Republic called this ruling a "bullet to the heart" of the ACLU, which is ridiculous. The ACLU has been strongly supportive of student's right to express their religious views. They defended a girl here in Michigan who wanted to have a Bible verse under her picture in the yearbook and they've defended other students in similar situations around the country.
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Was the ACLU even connected with this case?
As I mentioned in a comment on your previous post, any "occasional" assistance the ACLU gives to Christians is simply dismissed as a ruse to hide their true God-hating agenda.
I'm a member of the ACLU, and we're definitely on the kid's side. Free Republic is borderline retarded, minus the borderline part.
Hey hey hey! Don't go libeling the retarded!
Even if the ACLU wasn't directly invoved in this case, it doesn't really matter as this is merely part of a "chilling trend" supported by the ACLU.
Question: are the school officials who start these court fights really PC-liberal God-haters? Or are they conservative Christians taking a draconian interpretation of the rules just to pick fights and pretend there's a "war on Christianity?" I may sound paranoid here, but the Christian right have been well known to manufacture "controversy" where none really exists, and of course to fake persecution ("culture of death," anyone?), so I really don't consider my scenario all that outrageous.
Is it? From your description it sounds like the teacher just didn't know what qualified as establishment and folded over the picture of jesus to be safe. Perhaps there needs to be better administrative education as to what qualifies as establishment so that teachers can be informed of what to allow and what not to. That way we can prevent teachers from forcing kids to read from the bible and also prevent them from panicing if one of their students uses the g word.
The ACLU was not involved in the case at all, but they would certainly be on the side of the student. I don't think the school administrators are either liberal god-haters or conservatives hoping to spark a fight. I think they're extremely ignorant of the law and I think they've been listening to the rhetoric of the religious right that says that the courts have declared schools to be a "religion-free zone". That simply isn't the case, but the right has repeated it so much that many have started to believe it.
Matthew:
You're exactly right, but I don't know why you're questioning my statement that this is the sort of thing that feeds the paranoia among the religious right. That seems blatantly obvious to me.
. . .hmph. As a serious Christian, a number of questions come to mind:
1) Are the parents insane for suing over something that is so relatively trifling? If my public school did that, I'd simply get the heck out, pronto. Lawsuits require serious issues.
2) Why is the district so clueless as to what establishment is? (Ed, you nailed this in describing it as admin overreach)
3) I wish Free Republic would STFU. Makes the rest of us look like idiots.
Almost everyone in the anti-ACLU crowd misunderstands the ACLU's church-and-state stance. As with every other issue, the ACLU is remarkably consistent in its views on church and state. They oppose any attempt by the government to establish religion in any form, and they without question support the individual's right to express his or her religion. The ACLU would have been entirely behind the student in this case if they were involved. I don't see what's so hard about understanding that, but so many people think the ACLU is anti-religion.
Capt. Rational wrote:
This is serious overreach. While I agree with you that, generally speaking, the ACLU is against anything that even hints at establishment of religion and for anything that is legal personal religious expression, it's almost always a mistake to overstate how consistent they've been. Remember that there is not one ACLU, there are dozens - the national ACLU, all the state offices, and often multiple offices in the larger states (Michigan alone has 3, I believe). It's not all that unusual for two ACLU offices to be on opposite sides of a case when the case involves race, for example (some ACLU offices actually support hate speech codes, most don't). The ACLU is not "remarkably consistent" on practically anything; it's usually not hard to find at least one or two cases where some ACLU office has either said or filed briefs that said anything anyone wants them to say. It's certainly true to say that they've generally been on the side of truly student-initiated religious expression, but we probably shouldn't be claiming any organization as diverse as the ACLU is remarkably consistent about anything.
It will be interesting to see how ten commandment cases go now that Sandra Day O'Conner is gone. The last two, IIRC, found that a copy on the wall inside a court house was a no-no even though they attempted to surround it with other desiderata, while a ten commandments monument outside a different court house was OK since it had been there for decades and was among other monuments of various kinds.
This is why lawyers get paid the big bucks, I imagine.
Bill-
establishment clause jurisprudence is a huge mess. In some ways, O'Connor just made it messier by introducing the endorsement test, which had some other justices supporting it in some cases, but didn't have a majority in any one case. The whole thing is absurd.
While it might have been nice for the SC to hear the case, there really isn't any legal reasoning for them to do so. The 2nd made the right ruling for the right legal reasons.
I can see the teacher making the mistake. Some teachers who work with the lower grades, and some in the upper grades w/o much legal experience (many disciplines don't really require it) can be open to the same mistakes. Problem is, odds are good they asked admin (who I would expect to have completed an admin. law course or two), who then dropped the ball. That the district didn't drop the case, settle, etc., is utterly mind boggling.
All in all the district looks like a rather well educated (above national average in BA/BS & advanced degrees) white rural/suburban district. The county went to Kerry in '04, and went to Gore in '00 (54% both times).
Honestly doesn't look like a set up, looks like they f'd up, plain and simple.
dogmeat1b wrote:
Which is all the more reason for them to take it, to affirm the ruling and make it applicable nationally. There is currently a big split among the court districts on student religious speech and I'm almost always an advocate of the Supreme Court giving clearly applicable standards for lower courts to follow. I really wish they would do the same thing in a number of other areas as well.
Doesn't the fact that they refused to accept the case at least imply that they weren't concerned with the lower court's ruling?
Caledonian:
It could mean almost anything. The court is notoriously difficult to read in such situations as to why they decided not to take a case.
Ed Brayton | May 1, 2006 03:34 PM
...but I don't know why you're questioning my statement that this is the sort of thing that feeds the paranoia among the religious right.
I'd put it a little differently. This is the sort of thing that is used by leaders of the religious right to feed the paranoia of their flock. Feeding the paranoia of their flock is what gives them political leverage and financial contributions.
This was a local incident probably of relatively minor consequence in the long run. If the school had consulted the town's attorney--which they probably did not do--before they did what they did, it would probably not have been elevated to the status of a federal case.
raj wrote:
I'd say that's an accurate description.
While I agree that this is a local incident and that it was almost certainly not motivated by anti-Christian bias, I can't figure out the second part of it. Once the suit was filed, they obviously got legal advice and that should have told them they screwed up. Why didn't they settle the case right then? Not only did they not settle the case, they filed the appeal after losing in district court. What did they hope to gain by that? The right to keep a single 6 year old from drawing a picture of Jesus? It's baffling.