03-25-2012, 07:18 PM
These legislators - both Republican and Democratic - that voted for that bill, are trying to stay clear of the Supreme Court ruling that says any particular kind of religious speech cannot be advocated for by a public entity. They think this legislation skirts that issue because they have tried to frame it in student free speech terms - it's not the school as a public entity advocating for a religious position, it is students using their free speech to express their feelings about religious/inspirational matters.
Seems plausible on the very surface, but you don't have to look very hard to see the tarnish on the argument. When one of the bill's primary authors was asked that the wording of the bill suggested that a student could use that time to talk about satan as an inspiration, the legislator replied that schools have rules about disruptive behavior that would take care of that problem. That exposes the flaw in the logic that this bill is about student free speech. The schools are supposed to create criteria for what kinds of speech they want to accept in school sponsored activities. What that means is that the schools will de facto become advocates of certain religious views over others by the kind of criteria the establish. I imagine you could try to skirt that conflict with Supreme Court rulings by the schools making the criteria so open that practically any student could speak their religious thoughts - even if those thoughts ran contrary to school standards otherwise. But no school is going to want that, so they really have no way to avoid advocacy of certain religious perspectives over others in choosing criteria for what students may say in their "free" speech time, and thus they will run afoul of the Supreme Court rulings.
Seems plausible on the very surface, but you don't have to look very hard to see the tarnish on the argument. When one of the bill's primary authors was asked that the wording of the bill suggested that a student could use that time to talk about satan as an inspiration, the legislator replied that schools have rules about disruptive behavior that would take care of that problem. That exposes the flaw in the logic that this bill is about student free speech. The schools are supposed to create criteria for what kinds of speech they want to accept in school sponsored activities. What that means is that the schools will de facto become advocates of certain religious views over others by the kind of criteria the establish. I imagine you could try to skirt that conflict with Supreme Court rulings by the schools making the criteria so open that practically any student could speak their religious thoughts - even if those thoughts ran contrary to school standards otherwise. But no school is going to want that, so they really have no way to avoid advocacy of certain religious perspectives over others in choosing criteria for what students may say in their "free" speech time, and thus they will run afoul of the Supreme Court rulings.
