As if to balance out the universe, there's a report that a California teacher is now under fire for "anti-Christian remarks" after pointing out that the South has both the highest murder rates and rape rates, but also has the highest rate of church attendance, and suggesting that the two may be related. (He could have also pointed out that the South also has the highest illegitimacy rates as well.) So now a student and his parents want to sue the school and have the teacher fired. Why?
"Farnan’s family has filed a federal lawsuit against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming Corbett's remarks violated the First Amendment, which prohibits laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." "
Does Corbett's words in class make a law? No. Did they establish a state religion? No. Did his words prohibit the free exercise of religion? No. So, aside from the fact that Corbett is not even a government, making it impossible for him to violate anyone's 1st Amendment rights, this is a ridiculous accusation. However, in asking for the teacher to be fired, the parents are asking the government to violate Corbett's 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.
2 comments:
Don't forget infant mortality rates.
Public school teaching is a political minefield. Last Friday I was subbing in a grade 6 class and doing a (horrible) lesson on character description, and one of the characters on the worksheet the regular teacher left me (I should have known better) was Tiger Woods. I said that he had a flat nose, compared, for example, to my bulbous Scottish one, possibly because one of his parents is black and the other is Thai. Then one of the kids shouted out, "Like a monkey!" and another, "Long arms, short legs!" and the whole class began making monkey noises. I had to cut them off with a shout for quiet, and then explain that people evolved flat noses for good reasons, that black and Thai people aren't any more like monkeys than the rest of us, that all monkeys don't have flat noses, and that we're actually all apes anyway.
If that exchange were exaggerated and taken out of context a little bit (as kids are wont to do) and made it back to the wrong Christian or liberal parents, one or two phone calls would be enough to ensure that I never worked as a substitute in this town again. And these kinds of conversations happen every day in classrooms, or at least in classrooms where people talk about real life and not just sterilized, contrived nonsense.
Maybe that's a bit tangential, but I guess the point is that classroom teachers, especially early in their careers, are very vulnerable when exercising the right to free speech.
I had a similar experience when teaching a class at UTD. I was a TA for a professor for a humanities class, and when he learned I had a B.A. in biology, he asked me to teach the class on E.O. Wilson's evolutionary theory of human nature. It turned out that the professor also had a conference to go to that week, so it worked out well for him and the class.
Keeping in mind that I am teaching about evolution in Texas to a primarily Freshman class . . .
There was a lively discussion. I wish I could remember what it was the student said that resulted in my response to her, but based on the logic of what she said, I made the comment that "Well, if that's true, then God is a chimpanzee." No in-class outrage, just a continuation of the discussion.
But the next class period, the professor came up to me and said he had received a letter of complaint, to "let him know what was going on while he was gone." He asked me, "Did you really say that God was a chimpanzee?" I told him I had, but put it in context. Fortunately, he found the whole thing hillarious. A few years later, when he was teaching a senior-level humanities class on theories of human nature, he asked me to teach the class when he got to E.O. Wilson.
So I understand about keeping things in context.
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