House of Eratosthenes

Students, teachers and local pastors are protesting over a court case involving a northern Florida school principal and an athletic director who are facing criminal charges and up to six months in jail over their offer of a mealtime prayer.

There have been yard signs, T-shirts and a mass student protest during graduation ceremonies this spring on behalf of Pace High School Principal Frank Lay and school athletic director Robert Freeman, who will go on trial Sept. 17 at a federal district court in Pensacola for breaching the conditions of a lawsuit settlement reached last year with the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I have been defending religious freedom issues for 22 years, and I’ve never had to defend somebody who has been charged criminally for praying,” said Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the Orlando-based legal group that is defending the two school officials.

This is an important story, because one of the talking points out there is that nobody ever prohibits prayer at school, the prohibition is against proselytizing.

It seems the Santa Rosa County School District struck a deal as a result of a lawsuit…which, in turn, came out of this prohibition against proselytizing. Lawsuit, to deal, to court order, to jail. Baby steps. Now we’ve got people going to jail for praying, exactly the thing we’re often told is never happening.

The fight involving the ACLU, the school district and several devout Christian employees began last August when the ACLU sued Santa Rosa County Schools on behalf of two students who had complained privately to the group’s Florida affiliate, claiming some teachers and administrators were allowing prayers at school events such as graduations, orchestrating separate religiously themed graduation services, and “proselytizing” students during class and after school.

It takes some legal wrangling to forge a criminal act out of the First Amendment. It’s not a law designed to restrict the actions of people, it’s a law designed to restrict other laws that would ordinarily restrict the actions of people. This is supported by a simple reading of the plain text. “[O]r prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — it’s right in there.

Not that I’m saying anything anyone needs to know, that they don’t already know. The point is that thanks to the wrangling and massaging, a law that was clearly meant to support our central freedoms has been flipped around 180 degrees.

I’ve never been able to accept at face value these stories of students going off to complain to the ACLU. I went to school once; never did know where my local ACLU office was. So how do things like this work? The ACLU lawyer is sitting in his office one day, bored out of his skull, throwing pencils into the cork ceiling over his head…and suddenly he hears a knock at the door! “Hi, we’re a couple of students at such-and-such a school and we’re awfully concerned about some praying we’ve been hearing…”

Um, yeah. Somehow I doubt it went down like that.

Hat tip to Rick.

non-sequitur
Actually. I believe those acoustic ceiling tiles that get adorned with pencils, (and frilly ended sandwich toothpicks blown through a straw) are Cellotex.

I recall a (NJ I think) lawyer that made a living off of serial-suing liquor stores for failure to accommodate “disabled Americans” pursuant to the Americans With Disabilities Act. I suspect there was quite a bit of “settling”, before trial, in the majority of the cases. And trials ONLY if the extortion demands were given the one finger salute.
His “client”? An Well-under aged wheel chair bound girl.
- CaptDMO | 08/15/2009 @ 15:49

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Jail Time for PrayingSaturday, August 15th, 2009

Jail Time for Praying
Saturday, August 15th, 2009