High School Traditional Values Club Wins Equal Rights Victory
by Allie Martin
April 3, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative student club at one Michigan high school has won a major free-speech victory. After initially resisting the idea, school administrators recently allowed the group to display its flag alongside the rainbow colored flag of the school's Diversity Club.
Two years ago, members of the Traditional Values Club (TVC) at Howell High School in Howell, Michigan, approached the school's administration and asked permission to display their club's flag in the main school hallway. School officials refused the request, however, saying the flag could not be flown because the student group was not officially recognized by the school -- nor could it be recognized until it found a faculty advisor willing to sponsor it.
Steve Crampton is chief counsel with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, which assisted the TVC. He says the Howell High School faculty has been resistant to the student group's existence from its beginning and was initially reluctant to sponsor the club.
"The reason there was no one willing to serve as faculty sponsor, in my opinion, is because the school had already condemned the club, at one point calling them a hate group," Crampton asserts. "What faculty member, knowing that the administration has firmly stated that this is a hate group, wants to be affiliated with it?"
And yet, the attorney notes, the members of the Traditional Values Club stood tall, and "remarkably" continued to seek out a faculty member. When, after two years of arduous effort, the student club "finally got a sponsor," he says, the members "immediately went back to the flag issue."
Crampton says he is glad a lawsuit was not required to compel the school to recognize the TVC's right to official recognition and its equal right to display its flag. He points out that many public schools are hostile to the conservative Christian viewpoint. At one point, according to a Daily Press & Argus news report, roughly 40 staff members at Howell High School met with Principal Margaret Hamill to air concerns over the decision to allow the TVC to display its flag, which some see as a representation of the Christian faith.
"In schools such as Howell," the AFA Law Center spokesman observes, "I think the tables have turned to such an extent that you've got the upper hand in the pro-homosexual camp and, really, Christian students have become second-class citizens." As a result, they end up having to "go to extra lengths in order to obtain equal rights alongside a pro-homosexual group," he says.
In the end, Crampton says, persistence paid off for the students of the Howell High Traditional Values Club. He applauds the students, adding that their group "has been a model of patience and perseverance in the face of tremendous adversity."
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
