Apparently a display of the Ten Commandments had hung in the school for about a decade, and was removed recently under threat of a lawsuit by the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. And now some of the Christian students, encouraged by at least one youth pastor who was quoted as being "proud of our youth for taking this stand," are all upset because the school, a secular government institution in a nation whose founding document explicitly condemns and rejects a government endorsement of any particular religion, is no longer endorsing their religion by displaying quotes from its holy book.
Or, to put it more succinctly: These 200 Christian students are mad because their school has been pressured into following the dictates of the Constitution and our country's laws, instead of obliquely supporting Christian dominance.
It's a cliche phrase, but what are they teaching these children nowadays?
One student said, "Christ is a big, big, big part of Giles County. For those who don't like it, go somewhere else." Apparently the concept of tyranny of the majority, and why that's a bad thing and America's system is designed to protect against it, has never come up in social studies.
But I think my favorite Christian-supremacist quote from a student was this one:
"If you don’t like the Ten Commandments, don’t look at them. They are ours to look at if we like to look at them. If you don’t like them, don’t look at them."Uh-huh. So in terms of the rights of Christian students versus the rights of non-Christian students, Christian students have the "right" to have the school displaying and thus tacitly endorsing their holy text, while non-Christian students only have the right to look away? Yeah, that sounds totally like a fair and equal school experience between Christian and non-Christian students. Totally no privileging of one religion at the expense of all others, nope.
Kids, if you want the Ten Commandments to be part of your school experience, I suggest you go to a private Christian school, one that is not funded by the government and thus has no obligation to the laws regarding endorsement of religion in a government building. Or, failing that, print them out and stick them in your locker, or on the front of your binder, or embroider them on your backpack for all I give a damn. That way you get to look at them, and nobody else is forced to look away.
And to the youth pastor quoted, and the "about a dozen parents and community leaders" who met the kids outside the school and helped organize their protest: Shame on you. You're adults and you damn well ought to know better than to encourage this kind of pro-theocratic fuckery in your kids, inculcating in them the notion that their religion deserves to be catered to and granted power in government, despite America's pluralistic nature and explicit founding documents making clear our existence as a secular state.
