Posted on 11/29/2012 4:06:21 PM PST by drewh
When the word "God" becomes inappropriate in public schools, America really has ceased to exist.
Consider the story of a first-grade girl in West Marion, North Carolina, who had the word "God" stripped from a poem she wrote and was going to read at her school's Veterans Day assembly earlier this month.
The poem honored her two grandfathers who served during the Vietnam War.
“He prayed to God for peace," she wrote of one of them. "He prayed to God for strength.”
Unfortunately, a parent found out about this, and complained to the school district.
At a McDowell County Board of Education meeting last week, employee Chris Greene said, "We had one parent concerned with the use of the word God in this program. This parent did not want the word God mentioned anywhere in the program. When the demand from this person was heard, the rights of another stopped. It did so by hushing the voice of a six-year-old girl.”
"I believe that this little girl’s rights were violated," Greene continued, "and that those who worked so hard to prepare this program should receive an apology.”
“We need to keep in mind what was our country founded on,” said McDowell County resident Esther Dollarhyde. “It was founded on God and Jesus Christ, and our veterans went out and fought for us so we would have a free country, but if we aren’t allowed to honor them the way that the children want to then America is getting lost.”
School Board member Lynn Greene told McDowell News, "My understanding on the law is a teacher cannot promote any certain religion, but when it comes to students voicing their opinion or expressing themselves in a poem we pretty much have to give some leeway. To me this whole thing is a violation of that child’s rights. Nobody forced her to write the poem, that was her part of the program. She was asked to write a poem about veterans and she did. My personal opinion is that her rights were violated.”
After fully examining the issue during the BOE meeting, President and Chief Executive Officer Ken Paulson stated the school did in fact have the right to remove the word "God" from the child’s poem.
“Courts have consistently held up the rights for students to express themselves unless their speech is disruptive to the school,” stated Paulson according to McDowell News. “When the little girl wrote the poem and included a reference to God she had every right to do that. The First Amendment protects all Americans. She had every right to mention God, (but) that dynamic changed when they asked her to read it at an assembly.”
Leftists are intolerant haters of diversity.
This speech was at an assembly, she has free speech and should be able to say GOD if she wants. The students are not government employees, they are not the state.
Even if you believe in the “Separation of Church and State” how do you explain a child being a state??
Now government confiscates that money and forces you to send your kids to "public" schools, where they mandate freedom from religion.
Once again- ONE whiner with “hurt feelings” must take precedent over all.
Oh, hell no.
The poem is the poem......the parents need to raise holy hell about this.
Oh my Gosh....
Read how twisted this is. We've lost our minds if we let mentally ill people like this man run anything other than a garden.
This kind of krap happens in.... N. Carolina!???
Kids need to be trained. She should have agreed to whatever the school demanded be removed from the draft. Then she should read it as she wanted, saying the word God. Force them to unplug microphones and humiliate you in front of the whole school. Force them to give you an F, force them to suspend you. Those are called “damages”.
Parents and lawyers should be standing by for immediate action if the school takes any action about it.
Kids need to be trained. She should have agreed to whatever the school demanded be removed from the draft. Then she should read it as she wanted, saying the word God. Force them to unplug microphones and humiliate you in front of the whole school. Force them to give you an F, force them to suspend you. Those are called “damages”.
Parents and lawyers should be standing by for immediate action if the school takes any action about it.
Did any other children read poems?
It’s irrelevant. The school and School Board are wrong.
while one can argue that teachers and administrators are the government, they cannot argue that about the students. Students are the “citizen-customers” of public schools, and they forfeit no religious rights by virtue of being a part of that institution any more than they forfeit free speech by standing on a courthouse lawn.
Those two sentences were rather impressive for a first grader. In the first grade, I believe that my most coherent sentence was something like: ‘Mommy, have to go pee-pee.’
How tragic it will be for the godless when the Almighty kicks their name off of His list to enter heaven.
This is control by the "most easily offended" and it is the road to ruin. There is no logical end to this control and each successful example encourages the next and next and so on.
This is the bastard child of civil rights and political correctness resulting in a 'right' not to hear something. The idea that a (presumed) atheist can cause a 6 year old's tribute to her forbearers to be censored is anathema to our society as practiced over the past centuries. To have to censor ones own mind and speech is what made Orwell's 1984 so horrible, yet this youngling has just experienced that very thing!
Speaking strictly as a lifelong atheist: what part of “freedom of worship” are these rugged individuals too stupid to understand?
The child was not praying, she was telling a story. A story about a man who prayed. His praying was not the subject of the story, HE was the subject of the story. One of the things he did was pray but he did other things too.
There is no praying, promotion of religion or preaching by this little girl.
Are we to believe that the law forbids students and teachers from reading aloud from books, novels or plays, passages that contain the prayers of the characters? What if that play is Shakespeare, what if the book isa literary classic and the word God is in it?
I think and hope that in some of the cases like this the teachers and school principles don’t understand the law, have no common sense and just don’t know what to or what is right. That is why this stuff ends up in court. Teachers are not lawyers and they are taking away kids rights in their stupidity.
“Now government confiscates that money and forces you to send your kids to “public” schools, where they mandate freedom from religion.”
The 10th plank of the communist manifesto calls for free public education. They know how to bend a mind.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
