'Blocked E-Mails' Lawsuit Against School Board Can Go Forward, Says Judge
by Jim Brown
May 15, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A judge has allowed a pro-family group to continue its free-speech lawsuit against a Florida school board.The Florida Family Association is suing the Hillsborough County School Board in Tampa for setting up a block on all e-mail from the conservative group. Supporters of the group had sent about 60 e-mail messages to the board, urging it not to remove all religious holidays from the school calendar.
Don Conwell, an attorney for the Florida Family Association, says the board members initially vowed to immediately remove the block, which they claimed was put up to prevent their computer servers from being shut down.
"They also made a claim that they thought maybe [these messages] contained pornography," says Conwell. "However, we have evidence the school board actually opened one or more of these e-mails before putting the block into effect, so they clearly saw that it was not pornography."
Instead, he says, the board members saw the message was from individuals who were opposed to the action they were taking in removing the religious holidays from the calendar. "And they didn't want to hear from them," says Conwell. He contends the board was simply trying to come up with an excuse to justify its content-based restriction.
And the board's explanation about concern over the incoming e-mails shutting down its mail servers does not hold water, says the attorney.
"The school board serves an e-mail community exceeding 26,000," Conwell states, "and it's in the tens of thousands of e-mails that come through their servers per day. [F]or them to say that their receipt of only 60 e-mails made them reasonably believe that they were experiencing an assault on their computer servers -- it's just not credible at all."
Conwell explains that board members created a public forum by providing e-mail addresses for community members to contact them regarding issues before the board. Last November the school board dropped its ban on all religious holidays.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
