Fight over T-shirt leads to school board ditching prayer
One of the things you can always count on in small-town Texas is a distressingly high hypocrisy quotient. When a school can tell a student that she cannot wear a souvenir t-shirt that says “Somebody went to Hoover Dam and all I got was this ‘dam’ T-shirt”, you’ve got to wonder if someone in the school’s administration isn’t asleep at the switch.
Of course, then you go to a school board meeting in that same school district, and what’s the first thing that happens? It opens with a public prayer. So much for the separation of Church and State, eh? Well, this is Texas, and that separation still seems a very foreign concept to so many here. Too many Texans simply didn’t get the memo, and they cannot get their pointy li’l heads ‘round the idea that not everyone is a Christian, and that some folks are genuinely offended by seeing their tax dollars used to promote the majority religion (people like me, f’rinstance….).
Thankfully, this story has a happy and reasonable ending, as the controversy over the t-shirt led to the school board recognizing their responsibility to respect the sensibilities of all of those they represent, not just those who profess to follow the majority religion.
Trying to resolve the issue, Heather’s parents went to a Needville school board meeting, one J.R. Mercer says was opened with a prayer and praise of Jesus Christ, something he told us by phone he immediately found troublesome.
“The Bible says you know, you’re supposed to pray in private. That was the main issue there,” he said. “They were throwing the Christian deal out there on everybody and there may have been somebody out there that was just plumb offended by it.”
So the Mercers sued, not just over the freedom of speech and the T-shirt, but because of Mercer’s perceived lack of a separation between church and state.
Recently, a federal court ruled the shirt was a souvenir, one not protected by the First Amendment. The prayer issue was resolved when Needville’s school board agreed to never hold a denominational prayer again.
“I don’t know if you’d call this a victory,” said Mercer. “It’s just, it’s right. It was the right thing to do.”
The school board also agreed to pay $3,500 dollars to the Mercer’s attorney if the Mercers would drop the suit.
The school board says they didn’t want to pay for this legal fight over prayer, which would cost potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. They say the money may be better spent on the kids.
Instead of prayer, board president Jim Kocian says they have adopted a moment of silence before each meeting.
I think this was the right solution to the problem. A moment of silence lets those who want to pray do their thing. Those who choose not to pray can clean the lint out of their belly button, engage in random sexual fantasies, or wonder what the hot new kindergarten teacher looks like in her underwear. It’s a free country after all, right?
If people want to pray, let them do it on their own time and in their own way. It should not be forced upon everyone at a public event. This is the sort of religious tyranny our Founding Fathers fled in England. Apparently, we haven’t learned a whole hell of a lot from our own history, eh?
Site Navigation