I agree with Stop the ACLU.
Leave it to the ACLU to complain that upholding the first amendment actually violates it. How much more twisted can logic be and still be called logical.
Thankfully there are a few good lawyers out there who are able to defend Christian rights to freedom of expression. This is what happened.
A federal judge has ordered an upstate New York school district to return bricks inscribed with Christian messages to a high school walkway, and a pro-family civil liberties attorney is praising the outcome as a victory against viewpoint discrimination.
The dispute arose after the Mexico Academy High School class of 1999 in Mexico, New York (Oswego County), sold bricks that could be inscribed with personal messages and included in a walkway as a fundraiser. However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) complained that certain bricks, particularly those inscribed with the messages “Jesus Saves/John 3:16″ and “Jesus Christ, the only way,” constituted public school endorsement of Christianity.
The ACLU maintained that the bricks violated the so-called “separation of church and state,” and the group’s complaints prompted school officials to remove the contested bricks in 2000. Other bricks purchased by private individuals bore messages that referred to God or to local churches but were allowed to remain in place; only the bricks mentioning Jesus were taken out of the walkway.
The ACLU’s greatest and only true weapon is a threat. The big bully on the street. If you don’t do that we will take you to court. Since its so expensive to go to court most just act like cowards and back off. But not this time. Some stood up to the bullies.
“We’ve won several of these cases in this area,” Whitehead notes. ” It’s called viewpoint discrimination. You can’t discriminate against the religious viewpoint, and the judge said that’s what happened here. It violates the First Amendment.”
The attorney asserts that officials with the high school, in initiating the walkway fundraiser, created a public forum that allowed for private speech, and apparently the bricks with the Christian messages were initially welcomed. “But when the ACLU threatened a lawsuit,” he says, “they actually removed the bricks, and the judge said that’s viewpoint discrimination. That violates the First Amendment when you have different messages on a sidewalk or in [another public] forum.”
Really want to know the agenda the ACLU has? It’s in this paragraph.
If Christians lose the right to express their viewpoint in the public schools, Whitehead warns, “all those 50-some million children there are probably going to think Christians are kooks because we’re going to get so marginalized.”
The real goal is to marginalize and silence viewpoints the ACLU feels are intolerant in the new age where ‘Tolerance’ is the biggest virtue. Sound like an oxymoron? But again I digress… you already know their logic and it doesn’t make sense. Now where is that Oxy-Moron cleaner anyway. Wonder if it would clear up their logic like oxyclean to dirt?
The JAWA report also has this item.
