Silenced for Mentioning Jesus in Public

Saturday, July 15, 2006

It's a fruitless lawsuit but I'm all for it if it embarrasses the fascist administration for its handling of the student whose speech was too taboo for a graduation ceremony:

LAS VEGAS - A high school valedictorian who had the plug pulled on her microphone as she gave an address referring to Jesus Christ has filed a lawsuit against school officials, claiming her rights to religious freedom and free speech were trampled.

Brittany McComb, 18, said she was giving her June 15 commencement address to some 400 graduates of Foothill High School and their family members when the sound was cut.

"God's love is so great that he gave his only son up," she said, before the microphone went dead. She continued without amplification, "...to an excruciating death on a cross so his blood would cover all our shortcomings and provide for us a way to heaven in accepting this grace."

McComb's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Nevada, names the principal, assistant principal and the employee of the school in Henderson who allegedly pulled the plug.

McComb said she was warned that her speech would be cut off if she did not follow an approved script that deleted references to Christ and invitations for others to join the faith. But she memorized the deleted parts and said them anyway.

"In my heart I couldn't say the edited version because it wasn't what I wanted to say," she told The Associated Press. "I wanted to say why I was successful, and what inspired me to keep going and what motivated me. It involved Jesus Christ for me, period."

The lawsuit asks the court to declare that school officials deprived McComb of her rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, The Rutherford Institute, the conservative legal group backing the lawsuit, said in a news release.

High school students have no free-speech rights, at least not in a broad sense because we all know how creative students are - and what often happens when their behavior goes unchecked in the name of free speech. For example, what if instead the valedictorian claimed she had a First Amendment right to say something inappropriately vulgar? (Pretend for just a moment that there's something worse than mentioning God in a speech.)

So I expect the lawsuit to go nowhere but at least the story is getting publicity. People around the country are getting to see just how ridiculous the politically correct forces are. McComb did not proselytize or encourage her fellow students to believe in Jesus. She simply credited God's "only son" for her success, and she should have been afforded the few minutes to say so without interruption.

Of course the ACLU could care less about Brittany McComb because they're more concerned about the students who have the right to not hear the word God. I mean, there could have been atheists in the crowd and hearing the forbidden three-letter word might have offended them.

ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein was happy with the school's decision, saying "Proselytizing is improper in school-sponsored speech at valedictorian graduations."

Proselytizing? Thanking God is now a form of proselytizing? Did I miss the part in the story about McComb passing around Bibles or a signup sheet for potential converts during the brief speech? Of course, if she credited "Sex and the City" reruns for her straight-A performance we wouldn't be in the mess. But alas, what got her through high school is the one thing too dastardly to mention before a graduating class.