Civics 101: Silence a Student's Speech, Face a Potential Lawsuit
by Jim Brown
June 22, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A civil liberties group says it plans to sue the Nevada high school that unplugged the microphone of a valedictorian because her commencement speech mentioned her faith in Jesus Christ.The Rutherford Institute says it plans to file a lawsuit against Foothill High School in Henderson as early as next week over its censorship of senior Brittany McComb. Officials with the Clark County School District pulled the plug on McComb after she began reading a graduation speech that contained Bible verses and a reference to Jesus Christ.
Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead says the school engaged in religious viewpoint discrimination, something the Supreme Court has said is unconstitutional -- and something he believes some courts would view as "abhorrent" in this particular case.
"It's a little different than some of the cases where the courts have ruled that schools can control basically what students say," Whitehead explains. "Here they actually pulled the plug on her -- and I don't know if most people know about the news accounts, but there were like 400 people there [who] started booing and hissing when they cut off the mike on this girl."
Whitehead says the school was not endorsing religion or violating the so-called separation of church and state, but rather was doing everything it could to say it wanted nothing to do with what McComb was saying. McComb had deviated from a school-approved and edited version of her original address. But the Rutherford attorney says the case is not an Establishment Clause issue, but rather a First Amendment free-speech issue.
"If the schools are going to edit speeches ... then the principal or whoever [did the editing] should get up and give the speech, because it really isn't the kid that's giving the speech; it's the school speaking through a student," the attorney says.
"But it's not the fact that she agreed [to deliver the edited version of the speech]. The question is, does she have free speech? Can she give a speech and, at the end, say 'by the way, here's the most important thing in my life' -- before they pull the plug on her?"
McComb, he says, "worked hard to earn the right to address her classmates as valedictorian" and "has a constitutional right -- like other students -- to freely speak about the factors that contributed to her success, whether they be a supportive family, friends, or her faith in Jesus Christ." And school officials, by pulling the plug on the school's top graduate, have demonstrated "yet another example of a politically correct culture silencing Christians in order not to offend those of other beliefs," Whitehead adds.
Ironically, the school district may have violated its own guidelines by its actions. The Rutherford Institute notes that the official free-speech policy of the Clark County School Board states: "Where students or other private graduation speakers are selected on the basis of genuinely neutral, evenhanded criteria and retain primary control over the content of their expression...that expression is not attributable to the school and, therefore, may not be restricted because of its religious (or anti-religious) content."
According to Whitehead, school officials edited out almost half of McComb's original version. He says it is still unclear whether the American Civil Liberties Union had a role in editing the speech or advised the school board's lawyer to remove religious references, but he says regardless, the ACLU acted as a "government agent of suppression."
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
