A federal district court in California recently ruled that the Poway Unified School District in San Diego violated math teacher Bradley Johnson’s constitutional rights when it ordered him to remove two patriotic banners from the walls of his classroom because they “overemphasized” God.
Not only did Judge Roger T. Benitez expose the increasing discrimination against Judeo-Christian symbols and speech on the altar of a valueless “diversity” that elevates all cultures but our own, he also pummeled the pervasive contemporary myth that the Constitution forbids religious expression on public property.
For 25 years, a red, white and blue banner with “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” “God Bless America,” and “God Shed His Grace On Thee” had hung on Mr. Johnson’s classroom wall at Westview High School. A second banner, displayed for 17 years, included the words, “All Men Are Created Equal, They Are Endowed By Their Creator.” The wall also displayed numerous photographs of nature scenes and national parks, and posters of calculus solutions.
On Jan. 23, 2007, after one teacher raised a question about the banners, the school board voted to remove them. The school principal then ordered Johnson to tear them down “because they conveyed a Judeo-Christian viewpoint.” Yet teachers in other classrooms had hung a 35-to-40-foot-long string of Tibetan prayer flags; a large poster of John Lennon and the lyrics to the song “Imagine,” including “Imagine there’s no heaven. And no religion, too”; Mahatma Gandhi’s “7 Social Sins”; a poster of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader; and a poster of Muslim minister Malcolm X.
Squelching Johnson’s “patriotic and religious viewpoint while permitting speech promoting Buddhist, Hindu and anti-religious viewpoints,” the ruling stated, “clearly abridged Johnson’s constitutional free speech rights.” Federal and state constitutions, he wrote, “do not permit this one-sided censorship.”
To the argument that the banners ran afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” Benitez stated the obvious: “There is no realistic danger that an observer would think that the Poway Unified School District was endorsing a particular religion or a particular church or creed by permitting Johnson’s personal patriotic banners to remain on his classroom wall.” Especially, he added, in light of the other religious and anti-religious messages.
Benitez’s ruling was followed by a March 11 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that went against Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow. The appeals court held that a school-led Pledge of Allegiance to “one nation under God” does not violate a citizen’s right to be free of state-mandated religion.
Both rulings, and especially Benitez’s, have brought badly needed clarity to reconciling our country’s religious heritage with the constitutional prohibition against government endorsement of a particular religion.
The Constitution, in fact, “permits government some latitude in recognizing and accommodating the central role religion plays in our society,” the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in County of Allegheny v. ACLU. “Any approach less sensitive to our heritage,” it stated, “would border on latent hostility toward religion,” as it would require government to acknowledge “only the secular, to the exclusion and so to the detriment of the religious.”
To the argument that the banners might make an Islamic student uncomfortable – the principal speculating that an Islamic student might “feel like, Wow, I’m not welcome,” Benitez responded: “Of course, student comfort is not a constitutional test.”
“More to the point,” he stated, “an imaginary Islamic student is not entitled to a heckler’s veto” on a teacher’s expression “about God’s place in the history of the United States.”
Could this man please run for president?
District administrators, he pointed out, did not ask whether a Muslim student might feel uncomfortable with the anti-religious lyrics from “Imagine” or whether a Jewish or Christian student might feel uncomfortable “sitting under a string of Tibetan prayer flags inscribed with Sanskrit and an image of Buddha.”
Ironically, he stated, in attempting to foster diversity, the school district apparently “fears that students are incapable of dealing with diverse viewpoints that include God’s place in American history and culture.” Judge Benitez then ordered the school “to permit Johnson to immediately re-display, in his assigned classroom, the two banners at issue in this case.” Johnson returned the banners to his classroom that same day.
On March 8, the school district voted to appeal. The case will now go to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
While the Poway Unified School District apparently cannot accept Judge Benitez’s clear and common-sense ruling, other school districts throughout the state should post it in every classroom so students can learn what the Constitution really means.