School Censors Kindergartener’s Religious Expression
Imagine this! Your 5 year old child is in Kindergarten, and the assigns them homework to create a poster on how to save the environment. Your child expresses their creativity with a colorful picture that includes children holding hands around a globe, people picking up trash, clouds, grass, and a robed, praying figure depicting Jesus! Very proud of their picture, the hope to display it along with all the other children’s posters. Then the elementary school orders that the portion with the religious overtones be obscured! Unbelivable to imagine? You don’t have to, it reall happened. The school was in Baldwinsville, NY.
Via ADF
The First Amendment applies to all Americans–and that includes children. Public school officials cannot censor a student’s religious expression merely because it is religious,” said ADF Senior Counsel Joseph Infranco. “If 5-year-old Antonio’s take on preserving the environment is that only God can save the world, then it is his right to express that view. Religious speech is not second class speech in the eyes of the Constitution.”
The second version of the poster prepared by the student, Antonio Peck, who attended Catherine McNamara Elementary School as a kindergarten student during the 1999-2000 school year, depicted a robed, praying figure of Jesus, a church with a cross, people picking up trash for recycling, children holding hands around a globe, clouds, trees, a squirrel, and grass. School officials ordered the Jesus figure obscured when they placed in on display at the assembly.
Today, the 2nd Circuit panel disagreed with a federal district court decision that upheld the school’s decision: “In our judgment, however, the district court overlooked evidence that, if construed, in the light most favorable to Pecks, suggested that Antonio’s poster was censored not because it was unresponsive to the assignment…, but because it offered a religious perspective on the topic of how to save the environment.”
“The Supreme Court has recognized that ’students in the public schools do not shed their constitutional rights upon entering the schoolhouse gate,’” Infranco observed. “Today’s opinion from the 2nd Circuit is well in line with that principle.”
Shameful isn’t it? In today’s politically correct world that religious speech has become second class speech. What we once held as our dear rights of expression guaranteed through the Constitution are now censored through political correctness, and fear of offending someone else. And this was a five year old child!!! Talk about indoctrination! That is exactly what is happening in our schools! Our children are being indoctrinated with political correctness. The Alliance Defense Fund fighting, yet again for the freedoms that are quickly fading away!
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Posted by Jay on October 19, 2005 6:11 pm
» Filed Under ACLU
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8 Responses to “School Censors Kindergartener’s Religious Expression”
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Syndicate Me
Ubelievable!
That does suck. =\ Kids should be allowed to express their religion, so long as they’re not bullies about it.
Schools are crawling on the bellies like a snake because the administrators are so low. If you want a decent education for your kids, home school, or private schools. I did.
I read your posts, and I have one question: was it the ACLU that didn’t allow the child’t poster to be put up or the teacher? I have to admit I hardly know a thing about the ACLU being an Austrian living in Austria. But one thing I have learned here is to see the difference between organisations and people. Some people who are inorganisations overdo things, and then sometimes there are people who are in organisations who support the main idea but still see things in a different perspective. Well, just a thought….
The ACLU was not involved in this Veronika. But if this would have been a school censoring a satanist child, or a wiccan expression, or a Muslim one…they would have been. But I decided a while back that this site will be used for a wider scope of civil liberty issues other than just the ACLU.
I don’t write this to criticize you, just to make things clear to those who are new here, it would be a good idea if you had something like a tag for posts that are directly connected with the ACLU and others that are not. I think it would give youa better image to people who pop in checking you out.
wow, why didnt her teachers educate her properly that the only Islam is appropriate to express in a government funded public school.
Too bad we dont have the e mail of the school administrator of this school so we could send a flood of e mails like the case of the kindergarden teaching that homo are good prople. I would shoot off a couple of hot ones. I see where 2 parts of the first amendment were violated.