Blog #10

Parents Sue to Allow Religious Holiday Messages in Public Schools
By Emanuella Grinberg

If a young boy at school were to hand you a candy cane shaped pen with a Christmas story on it would you feel that they are offending your religion or trying to convince you to join theirs? I don’t think so but in this article it describes a lawsuit that started by a few actions by students and school officials. A boy Jonathan was this boy handing out the pens, his family thought that he should be able to do this to show his religion to others in the spirit of the schools upcoming holiday party. The pens were taken away by the school officials because it was against the district policy because they didn’t want to seem that they were supporting one religion over the others. According to the article there have been many other cases like Jonathans. I think that the lawsuit is pointless because even though we have freedom of speech it is over the fact that a kid can’t hand out a pens at school. I think that we should be able to freely express our religion but this is just an inconvenience to the school and the families’ time. Last year we almost had a lawsuit against our middle school over a logo on a t shirt that was said to be obscene but now I think it was an interesting experience but some of the people just wanted to get out of class. Overall I think that the lawsuit was not worth it but you should be able to have religious freedom of speech.

Grinberg, Emanuella. "Parents Sue to allow religious holiday messages in public schools." CNN Court TV 27 Dec 2004 4 Mar 2009 .