Students have rights
CFI is explaining to public school administrators about the First Amendment. It’s kind of pathetic that such administrators have to have it explained to them.
The Center for Inquiry challenged two high schools in Louisiana, as well as the administrators of public schools and public school athletics, to cease recent policies that fringe on the First Amendment rights of students.
In a joint letter from a broad swath of the secular movement, CFI told Waylon Bates, principal of Parkway High School, as well as others in charge of school policies in Louisiana, that threatening to discipline student athletes for protesting during the National Anthem is unconstitutional. CFI demanded retraction of the threat as well as a commitment that organized prayer would no longer be permitted at high school football games.
Bates, with the support of Scott Smith, the superintendent of Bossier Parish Schools, had informed his student athletes they would be disciplined if they were to follow the lead of so many professional athletes who recently protested during the National Anthem.
The Supreme Court has long held that schools may not compel student participation in patriotic displays against their will. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, the highest court invalidated a law requiring public school students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or face discipline.
“Students don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel, and one of the signatories to the letter. “Nor do they abandon those rights by putting on a football helmet. Students may not be compelled to be patriotic, and our courts have long recognized that.”
A better way to get students to be patriotic would be for the nation to be a better nation. Right now it’s a horror of a nation.
“Funny” (for some value of the word) — only today I stumbled across a reminder in the Random Related Posts section of another blog entry, casting back to the day Jessica Ahlquist won her case in Rude Island (is that spelling rite?) against her high school and some State Reprehensible who called her an Evil Little Thing on local radio for protesting a religious inscription at the school. Many people bought T-shirts with that inscription for her college fund, which ended up north of 60k. She must have graduated now. I still sleep in that shirt, but the text is fading.
One might have hoped the need for this struggle would have faded too by now. How many times must we win to secure constitutional rights? (Rhetorical)
Answering anyway: forever. The frequently praised soldiers and sailors who fought, bled, and died to assure us various Constitutional freedoms won a bit less than that sounds like. They won the rest of us the ability to keep fighting for them, only we get to fight in court rooms, ballot booths and demonstrations instead of on battlefields. That’s definitely an improvement – and well worth accolades and gratitude, don’t get me wrong – but it’s the people who figure we only need or should have the “freedoms” tradition, authority and force permit who want us to forget about that work to do peacefully still. We’ll have to keep at it til minds are securely changed and no one with a lick of authority or threat dreams of mandating prayer or nationalist ritual.
Rrr – I met Jessica at CFI that year. The State Reprehensible who called her evil little thing got busted for embezzlement earlier this year:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/01/20/former-ri-state-rep-who-called-teen-atheist-an-evil-little-thing-arrested-for-embezzlement/
I love wearing my Evil Little Thing sweatshirt. It always gets comments and questions, and people are quite shocked when I explain to them that this girl was treated so badly for standing up for the Constitution. So far, everyone I’ve explained it to has been on her side; of course, most of these are theatre people, and they tend to run toward liberal, and rather religiously skeptical (though hopelessly post modern and New Age).
One might almost pray that Former Rep Palumbo had some similar words of wisdom on his office wall to keep him from going evil.
IIRC, the mural went something like this: Dear God, please let me not be an asshole and a bad loser. It could have helped, I think, to make him stop gambling away his election fund at casinos. (Or at least not lose?)