EDITORIAL: Another fine First Amendment mess – Goshen News

Last year, some students at Carmel High School were allowed to put up an anti-abortion sign. This year, a different group of students were told they could not hang a pro-abortion rights sign.

That is discrimination based on viewpoint, and that is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Naturally it's time to bring in the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana and take the school system to court, by God!

OF COURSE THE story is a tad more complicated than that, and the episode should serve as a warning for school districts inclined to stray from their mission under the false impression that they must accommodate every student demand for this or that "right."

A school is not a microcosm of the country, with students counted as citizens and school officials standing in for "the government." A school is a structured learning environment in which anything not aimed at imparting knowledge must be put aside. True, students don't leave their rights at the schoolhouse door, but the rights they have are not the same as a citizen's in dealing with government.

If schools choose to ignore that reality, they owe it to students to have very clear rules that are widely disseminated and understood. This is what Carmel failed to do.

The school at first took down the anti-abortion sign last year. But it put it back up for 10 days after the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel threatened legal action, arguing that the school had allowed other ideological messages on signs, including a donkey on a sign for a student club for Democrats and the use of a rainbow and the word pride on signs for a group supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. The anti-abortion sign said "3,000 Lives Are Ended Each Day" and featured the word "abortion" changed to say "adoption."

THE SCHOOL SAYS groups may post signs only if they advertise group meetings. Lawyers for the school district say the new sign did not include the group's name or meeting details, which the sign last year did. But the ACLU, like the Liberty Counsel before, is citing all the previous ideological signs allowed.

Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana says the controversy over the new sign "opens a can of worms, doesn't it?"

Indeed, it does. And it's not the students who are at fault.

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel

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EDITORIAL: Another fine First Amendment mess - Goshen News