Ethics

California Teacher Liable for Anti-Christian Comment

By Ed Brayton

About a year and a half ago I reported on a lawsuit filed in Capistrano Valley, California over a history teacher making a raft of anti-Christian comments in his classroom. The ruling (PDF) has now come down in that case and the plaintiff won, but only in regard to a single statement made by the teacher.

It was filed as an establishment clause suit, arguing that such comments amounted to hostility toward religion and therefore were forbidden for a teacher to make during instructional time. The judge in the case thus applied the Lemon test and evaluated the series of comments, which were captured on tape, on the basis of whether the teacher had a secular purpose in stating them.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).