Cupertino Lawsuit

Cupertino Case Post-Mortem

stcynic — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:10:18 +0000

Cupertino Case Post-Mortem

The 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 reassigned to a middle school, chose to resign from the district.
Williams, an "avowed orthodox" Christian, sued the district and, among others, Patricia Vidmar, his principal at Stevens Creek Elementary School. He said they did not let him create his own lessons on the Founding Fathers' views on God and religion and on the role of faith in early America. In underwriting his defense, an Arizona-based legal fund, Alliance Defense Fund, threw red meat to the conservative news media with the inflammatory proclamation, "Declaration of Independence Banned From Classroom."

Nonsense. The Declaration was included in the fifth-grade textbook and is displayed in schools throughout the district. That wasn't the only distortion in the case. Williams' materials gave a slanted perspective of history; one book on his list, "Washington's Prayer Journal," though popular with religious conservatives, has been proved by historians to be a fake.

The agreement is fine. Williams never had a case.

Hear, hear.

stcynic Tue, 08/23/2005 - 06:10

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Cupertino Lawsuit

That wasn't the only distortion in the case.

Why aren't people willing to call a lie, a lie? Distortion? No. Lie, Yes.

Steven Williams Resigns from Cupertino Schools

stcynic — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:31:18 +0000

Steven Williams Resigns from Cupertino Schools

The 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 Sat, 08/20/2005 - 10:31

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Cupertino Lawsuit

I suspect that was part of the terms of the settlement agreement. That is usually something that CTA works out prior to such settlements; it is pretty much SOP for resolution of these sorts of cases. Mr. Williams will receive no official negative statement from the District if he applies to work in another one in the state. However, the publicity surrounding this case will hamper his hiring chances. He would do well to find one of his patrons to sponsor him in a private teaching position with some local Oregon church school.

Ed, off-topic, but a head's up, from today's NYTimes

Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html?hp&ex=1124683200&en=0bd235262066da5c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

I haven't read the article yet.

Another off-topic, but possibly interesting matter, from today's Boston Globe, regarding a matter that may be of interest on this blog. It's a letter to the editor.

Intelligent Design has no backing from science
August 21, 2005

GARETH COOK'S account last Sunday of the intelligent design theory appears to be a sober, evenhanded treatment of a scientific controversy (''Project on the origins of life launched," Page A1, Aug. 14). But it is not a scientific controversy. It has little or nothing to do with science.

Cook cites the claims of biochemist Michael Behe, but fails to make it clear that every one of them has been refuted in the scientific literature. The opinions of Behe and the few other ID proponents with scientific credentials are not evidence; they have never been presented in the primary literature of science. When confronted with refutation, Behe and others of the ID effort retreat to Cook's platitude: ''Neither proves or disproves the existence of God."

Anyone who reads the voluminous output of the ID movement, or hears its speeches to the religious, knows that it is primarily a public relations venture. Its central claim is that evolution and evolutionary biology are false. It insists that the ''errors" in evolutionary biology be taught -- as disclaimers of modern biology -- to schoolchildren, and that biologists are conspiring to cover up the truth. There is nothing platitudinous about this. It's just good PR.

Cook's other truism is that ''Darwin's theory . . . does not explain how the universe began, or describe forces that act outside the material realm." But neither Darwin's theory nor any other modern biology is about how the universe began. That's a question in cosmology. And whether or not science makes further progress in research on the origin of life -- today a busy, independent discipline -- Darwinian evolution is the only robust scientific explanation we have for the history of life. If there are ''forces that act outside the material realm," then so far, at least, no shred of objective evidence for them has been presented.

PAUL R. GROSS
HinghamThe writer is a professor emeritus of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia.

To continue the off-topic, you all should really catch this week's Bill Maher episode on cable. He really rips the ID people and their supporters -- and intelligently too -- at the end of the show in his ending monologue. It's a must watch.

I've already seen the NYT article, but hadn't seen Paul's letter to the Boston Globe. There's a pretty big story that will hit the papers coming out of the Pennsylvania trial in the next few days. Keep an eye out for that.

We don't need him here in Oregon. We have enough people propagating religious indoctrination in schols, I.D. and whether or not our country is truly a Christian one vis a vis the beliefs of the founding fathers.

Conservative Media Silence on Cupertino Suit

stcynic — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:06:23 +0000

Conservative Media Silence on Cupertino Suit

When 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 it. Fox News' website contains no mention whatsoever of the withdrawal of the suit. Likewise for WND and Newsmax. Free Republic does mention it, but only to present the ADF's highly dishonest declaration of victory press release and scream in righteous outrage that it took a lawsuit to allow kids to read the Declaration of Independence (which is, of course, utter nonsense).

stcynic Mon, 08/15/2005 - 18:06

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Cupertino Lawsuit

Hard to blame them, I think everyone was deceived by the poor initial reporting on the case.

Matthew wrote:

Hard to blame them, I think everyone was deceived by the poor initial reporting on the case.

I disagree, for this reason: they continued to report the same nonsense even after the truth came out. Sean Hannity kept claiming that the Declaration of Independence had been banned even after the teacher himself said that wasn't true on his show. When the first story broke in the paper, I thought if this is true then the school clearly is out of bounds. But it took a matter of hours to find out the truth and I'm just a low level blogger. Certainly a major media outlet can do better than that. The fact that they kept repeating the lie about the Declaration even after the plaintiff in the case told them directly that it wasn't true means you certainly can blame them.

I agree with Ed. I think it is unfortunate, but true, that many are not really concerned with the truth, or with facts -- they are concerned with ideology. Hannity, O'Reilly, and others of this ilk (I'm sure there are liberals that can be added to this list) have never allowed a fact to get in the way of a talking point. Insofar as they claim to be guided by truth, they can be held responsible to to degree to which they have ready access to that truth. And as Ed notes, they often do have plenty of access, and so they have plenty of responsibility.

It's certainly not difficult to find those on the left guilty of the same thing. The Dan Rather memo fiasco is the obvious one that comes to mind, but that's a regular journalist not a polemicist. For polemicists like Hannity and O'Reilly - or James Carville, or Al Franken, etc - truth almost always takes a backseat to convenient lies that serve their goals, regardless of their political ideology.

I agree, as I noted in my post. Ideology is a politically neutral term.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the agreement requires both sides to say little about it. A press release from one side or the other might irritate the hell out of the judge.

So, the question is, which organization of rational people, wholly unaffiliated with the suit, will put out a press release calling attention to the thing?

For that matter, maybe it just takes a news tip to the editors at Fox -- has anyone tried?

"But it took a matter of hours to find out the truth and I'm just a low level blogger. Certainly a major media outlet can do better than that." Give yourself some credit, Ed. Major media outlets like the New York Times (Jason Blair) and CBS (Dan the man)couldn't spend the time to make sure they had their story right. Electronic media has much more credibility than print or airwave media. Facts can be checked fairly quickly without leaving your home. You do have to wade through the writer's opinions but I find that entertaining. I certainly don't take their opinion's personally because that limits the number of sites you can visit.

Facts can be checked fairly quickly without leaving your home.

Lies can be spread fairly quickly without leaving your home too. When I was young, I had to walk through three feet of snow to spread lies about someone. Then he beat me up...

Raging Bee, you are correct. I try to limit my reading to blogs that link to the facts or facts that can be checked. But I know what you mean. By the way what is the Drudge headline today? Oh, and I hope you've recovered from that beating...

Just the other day on Al Franken, he was pretty quick to repudiate NARAL's John Robert's ad.

As a fig leaf he clearly states that he is a *comedian* doing a comedy show so don't go there looking for the truth.

Facts can be checked fairly quickly without leaving your home

I know what you are referring to, but I do have to tell you that the "facts" available over the internet are often preposterous.

Just because a "fact" is posted on the Internet doesn't mean that it has anything to do with reality,

Cupertino Lawsuit Withdrawn

stcynic — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:39:57 +0000

Cupertino Lawsuit Withdrawn

Steven 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 of a religious nature as long as it is "objective, age appropriate and in compliance with the curriculum prescribed by the district" and that the administration has the final say on what materials meet that standard.

The amusing thing is that the ADF is actually spinning this as a victory! Their press release on the settlement says:

"We are pleased that this matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties," said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot. "The school district is to be commended for agreeing that their policy allows teachers, no matter what their religious beliefs, to use handouts of historical significance that have religious content, like the Declaration of Independence."

But a mere paragraph later the same press release admits that this was already the policy of the school district:

The settlement agreement puts in writing district policy that "allows teachers, no matter what their religious beliefs, to use appropriate educational material (including supplemental handouts of historical significance) during instructional time that has religious content" and also allows teachers "to teach students during instructional time about matters involving religion" so long as the content is compliant with district-prescribed curriculum and is not used to influence a student's religious beliefs.

This was the school's policy before this happened and it's the school's policy now. But the settlement also agrees that the administration has the final say in deciding when this standard is met, which means Williams won absolutely nothing in this case. The materials he used, which were literally filled with false claims and distortions, still are disallowed because they fail to meet the above standard. The ADF began this process by lying about the school's policy with their first press release declaring that the Declaration of Independence had been "banned from (the) classroom" and they're lying with their press release now. The only thing this settlement did for Williams was prevent him from being countersued for bring a lawsuit that was clearly frivolous.

stcynic Mon, 08/15/2005 - 14:39

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Cupertino Lawsuit

I wonder whether the Alliance defence fund will be reimbursing the school district for the atty fees in view of the obvious asmission that the suit was frivolous.

raj wrote:

I wonder whether the Alliance defence fund will be reimbursing the school district for the atty fees in view of the obvious asmission that the suit was frivolous.

No, the settlement agreement says that each side is responsible for paying their own legal fees and that neither one can take any further action either on the merits of the case or the fees. And that, I would guess, is the only thing that Williams won in this case.

Cupertino Lawsuit Update

stcynic — Thu, 12 May 2005 08:06:13 +0000

Cupertino Lawsuit Update

As 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 expression in the classroom," said Ware in dismissing the three claims.

However, Ware did say he would further consider Williams' allegation that the school district treated him differently because of his Christian faith.

The only charge left is an equal protection charge, but I can't imagine that will succeed given that the basis for such a charge has been dismissed. If the school was correct in preventing Williams from handing out the supplemental materials (and they were, those handouts were not only full of attempts to proselytize but also full of inaccuracies), there's really no case for him being treated differently. Almost every other teacher at that school is Christian and so are most of the parents, so the notion that the school is just discriminating against Christians is simply absurd. What distinguishes him from the other Christian teachers at the school is that they understand that their position should not be abused to bring their religious views into the classroom, and they don't hand out materials riddled with false quotations and fraudulent documents. Those facts alone justify the oversight.

stcynic Thu, 05/12/2005 - 04:06

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Cupertino Lawsuit

See Ed you still don't get it, Christianity is the 'in' club. Get any 100 christians together ask them ten questions and you will never get them to agree on all 10 answers. It's an amorphous mess that is essentially a social mechanism.

Whether one buys into the supernatural aspects of it is hardly the point anymore. This fellow likely feels he is the one 'true' christian on campus and the others are not.

Everyone around here, well most, call themselves Christian, then enjoy the wide range human activities available to them.

It is interesting that the matter was referred straight to federal district court, where the due process under equal protection issue could at least be determined. It seems that Williams legal team were unwilling to pursue the issues in the local County Superior Court, where the judges are elected and where many of the substantive constituency also resides. He certainly is not receiving legal support from his teachers' association representatives, as they are not allowed under the bylaws to take cases to Federal Court.

There was an equal protection count in the complaint? Oh, please, this is ludicrous. When he's in front of a classroom, he's an agent of the school board (i.e., the state). There's no equal protection issue.

Update on Cupertino Lawsuit

stcynic — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 18:17:29 +0000

Update on Cupertino Lawsuit

The 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 teacher Stephen Williams against the Cupertino Union School District as challenging a complete ban by the school of the Declaration of Independence from the entire school. That characterization is wrong."

Amusing, but quite off point. The inaccuracy in the media reports is not over the question of whether the Declaration was banned from one classroom or from the whole school, but whether it was banned at all. The truth, of course, is that it was not banned at all. It's in the school's history textbooks and full copies of the Declaration are posted in the school, including in Mr. Williams' classroom. The ADF was the one who issued a press release when they filed the suit that was entitled "Declaration of Independence Banned From Classroom", and now they are actually blaming the media for taking them seriously. I blame the media for taking them seriously too, but since that lie began with the ADF, it's hardly credible for them to complain about it, now is it? It never ceases to amaze me that the same people who scream that there is no morality without their religious beliefs can behave so dishonestly.

stcynic Sun, 02/06/2005 - 13:17

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Cupertino Lawsuit

Hopefully the court will say the following to the LIARS at ADF:

SUMMARY JUDGEMENT! DISMISSED!

Thanks for the above article. The quote above is from an official ADF press release that, I believe, is only given to reporters who ask for it. It was reported in both the San Jose Mercury News and the Cupertino Courier, and it is posted at http://eriposte.com. The Cupertino Union School District has filed a Motion to Dismiss that will be ruled upon on March 28, 2005. It can be viewed at http://StevensCreekParents.com. It is too bad a dismissal won't be broadcast at prime time on FOX news.

Cupertino Parents Respond to Lawsuit

stcynic — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 16:25:52 +0000

Cupertino Parents Respond to Lawsuit

A 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 lawsuit here.

stcynic Sun, 01/02/2005 - 11:25

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Cupertino Lawsuit

Be sure to read Richard Crouch's page in its entirety as he makes a number of excellent points:

Weakness of media coverage of Williams case

Update on the Declaration of Independence Story

stcynic — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 13:24:45 +0000

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.

stcynic Sun, 11/28/2004 - 08:24

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Cupertino Lawsuit

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.