Cupertino Lawsuit
stcynic | August 23, 2005The San Jose Mercury News has an op-ed on the Cupertino lawsuit that says all of the same things I've been saying about this case:
But let's call the agreement what it was: a total victory by the district over conservative lawyers who drummed up a bogus claim of religious persecution. They had badgered and ridiculed the district to try to push religion into the schools.
The agreement lets fifth-grade teacher Stephen Williams and his attorneys save face; the district, in return, saved taxpayers' money by not having to further fight a flimsy lawsuit. This week, Williams, who had been…
stcynic | August 20, 2005The teacher who sued the Cupertino school district, falsely claiming that his rights were violated, has resigned and is moving to Oregon. This just days after he withdrew his lawsuit.
stcynic | August 15, 2005When the Cupertino lawsuit was filed last fall, the conservative media went berserk over it. Fox News shows did nearly a dozen segments on it, with Hannity and Colmes even moving their entire show to Cupertino and staging a rally to "Take America Back". The Worldnutdaily, Newsmax and Free Republic all filed story after story about this outrage. Now that a judge dismissed 3 of the 4 grounds for the lawsuit and the teacher has withdrawn the last one, with no change in policy whatsoever, I thought it would be interesting to see how those outlets handled the story. Needless to say, they ignored…
stcynic | August 15, 2005Steven Williams' fraudulent lawsuit against the Cupertino public schools has been withdrawn and is over. I wrote time and time again that this case, brought on behalf of Williams by the Alliance Defense Fund, was completely ridiculous. The ADF had been incredibly dishonest in their representation of the facts. Now they have apparently come to their senses and dropped the false accusations. You can see the official settlement here. The "settlement" is actually an admission that the suit was false, since it recognizes that the current district policy allows teachers to use supplemental material…
stcynic | May 12, 2005As a follow up on the last story, I don't know how I missed this when it happened: the judge in Steven Williams' lawsuit against the Cupertino school district has dismissed 3 of the 4 complaints in the lawsuit.
In a hearing at the U.S. District Court in San Jose March 30, Judge James Ware dismissed three of four allegations made by Stephen Williams. Williams had claimed school district personnel violated his freedom of speech, had a vague policy on supplemental materials in the classroom and infringed on his right to religious expression.
"I am not aware of any right that allows religious…
stcynic | February 6, 2005The Alliance Defense Fund has apparently filed a modified complaint in the Steven Williams lawsuit in Cupertino. The new complaint includes a couple of other handouts that the principal wouldn't allow Williams to hand out, both of them apparently with some historical problems of their own. ERiposte has posted an update to his response that includes a critique of those two new handouts. He also quotes from a letter sent from the ADF to one of the parents in the Cupertino school district, with the ADF saying:
"Some media reports have incorrectly characterized the lawsuit filed on behalf of…
stcynic | January 2, 2005A group of over 100 parents in Cupertino, California have put up a website to respond to the innumerable inaccurate media reports of the situation in their schools that is the subject of a lawsuit by teacher Steven Williams, filed by the Alliance Defense Fund. The ADF's highly dishonest press release, titled Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom, began the typical media frenzy surrounding such cases, most of it blindly accepting the nonsense in that story. The website includes letters and analysis from several parents within the school district. I've written a lot about the…
stcynic | November 28, 2004It'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…