And it’s not even Mississppi or Idaho, it’s Ohio. The Columbus Dispatch:
The Ohio House on Wednesday approved legislation that would protect student rights to religious expression in public schools, including prayer, school assignments, artwork and clothing.
Lawmakers passed House Bill 164 by a vote of 61-31 and sent it to the Senate for consideration.
Let’s hope the Senate says Nah.
The bill, dubbed the “Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019,” would require schools to:
‒ Give student religious groups the same access to school facilities for meetings and events as secular groups have.
‒ Lift bans limiting student expression of religion to lunch or non-instructional periods.
‒ Abolish any restrictions on students from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork or other assignments.
Meaning they could turn in biology homework full of “Goddidit”?
We’re doomed.
Comments
14 responses to “Religious expression in school assignments”
Sounds like reasonable grounds for lawsuits (also Ohio is hot garbage; I was born there and the only relatives from there I still talk to are my mother and brother)
One important reason why we have religious schools all over the planet is the desire of parents to have their offspring educated in the religious tradition that is the intellectual framework of their wider group that supplies identity: ‘I am a Catholic’; ‘I am a Muslim’; ‘I am a Calothumpian’; etc,etc. Believing is the means to belonging. It does not matter what the belief is, as long as we all believe it together.
However, the history of religion shows that separate congregations fall to competition, rivalry, poaching and so on fairly readily. So parents and priests alike try to prevent too much contact between divergent beliefs. At the same time, survival in the modern world requires familiarity with one’s cultural and intellectual roots: literature, history, science, mathematics and so on.
Education and science work to open the mind. Religion’s function is to close it, and limit questioning and reason.
The societies where religion has the upper hand tend to stagnate and become refugee-generators. Vide polytheistic India vs monotheistic Pakistan (an economic and political basket-case) next door.
I’m betting that the bill was written with just one religion in mind.
So if little Timmy uses 3 as a practical version of pi, or reports that insects have 4 legs…or insists that slaves should honor their masters.
And that’s just the particular set of Sincere Beliefs the Ohio lawmakers were thinking of. The wilder fringes of Islam can get stranger yet.
It is proposed: The Pliny Religious Accommodation Act
1) Students and parents who provide written endorsement of the terms of this act will be allowed to answer any test or essay questions based upon the religiously endorsed state of science and technology at the time of the official date of origin of their religion.
2) Signatories will be prohibited from accessing, purchasing, or utilizing any scientific or technical innovations (including but not limited to medical innovations) discovered after that date.
3) Now free to live a life of pious contemplation, they must now shut the F up.
This one seems innocuous at first, until you realize that this is for public schools, and that means public money funding a particular religious establishment. Nope, hard pass. (Of course, the same reasoning that prevents public money from funding religious organizations suggests that said organizations should not be tax-exempt, but I digress.)
I’m actually curious what this so-called ban bans. Are students prohibited from letting on that they’re Xtian/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/etc. except during lunch and study hall? That I find difficult to accept. Are students not allowed to pray? Again, not buying it. Are they not allowed to proselytize? Ah, now that one I do believe. And there’s no way I want public instructional time at all diverted to a non-instructional purpose. If you’re in a class about X, then all the time should be spent on X. Taxpayers pay for schools to teach X, not X minus whatever time is eaten up by evangelizing children.
Wat. Again, I’m not sure what is meant here. My suspicion is that it means that students should be allowed to provide religious answers to their science homework. That’s not gonna fly with me. If your art teacher asks you to do a watercolor of your favorite person, and you draw Da Jeebuz, that’s fine by me.
The actual bill appears to me to be reasonable, fair, and constitutional. The reporting, however, sucks, which is why it’s drummed up so much fury.
You can find House Bill 164 here
The full text is too long for me to reproduce here, as the bill contains a bunch of administrative provisions that do not appear relevant to this discussion. Here are the relevant provisions:
This is consistent with, and in fact required by, the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Public schools can’t allow the AV Club or Model UN to use a classroom to meet after school and deny the same right to the Bible Club or Muslim Students Association or the Atheists Society.
Emphasis added by me. This is probably already required constitutionally, and I’m not sure I would change a word. Basically: an English teacher can’t give you a lousy grade, or a good one, because your short story contained Christian elements, or Muslim ones, or lacked religious elements.
There’s been some fear-mongering that this means a student could answer a science exam with “the bible says the Earth is 6,000 years old” or “evolution is a lie and God created man” and demand an A. Not under any reasonable reading of that language. Students are still obligated to meet the “ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance,” i.e. demonstrate learning of the assigned material. At most, this might mean that a student who recited the correct answer for the age of the earth, and then gratuitously added “but I don’t believe that, because the Bible tells me otherwise” could not be penalized — but I’m not sure how many teachers would do so anyway.
And finally:
I trust nobody can find anything objectionable in that.
Pliny: Your proposal would have the additional benefit of greatly reducing the carbon footprint of the fundigelical community. I think it should be included in the Green New Deal.
Screechy, I think the problem people are having with this bill is that it is a model bill put forward by creationists for the precise purpose of skirting constitutional requirements. I, for one, do have a problem with the idea that a student cannot be penalized for the religious content of their work. This is aimed totally at science, because teachers don’t tend to penalize students for drawing the nativity (though there may be some restrictions on where such work can be posted, and making sure it is obvious that the student did it themselves and was not instructed to do so by the teacher, and it reflects only the student’s spontaneous expression). They do not typically penalize students if they write their “My Favorite Historical Person” essay on Jesus or Moses, in spite of the doubts that one or both of them may not be historical. They do get “penalized” for putting that the earth is 6000 years old in science class.
Yes, the bill included “meeting current academic standards”, but I suspect that is window dressing, because these bills are not intended to support scientific standards but to circumvent them. They sound good, fine, great, but they can lead to trouble. Intelligent Design and Creation “Science” have been declared religious instruction and not scientific by the courts, but there are many who will argue that these do meet academic standards that they are scientific, and that their child is being discriminated against on the basis of religion.
I don’t think this is fearmongering. The history of such bills is out there, and as a teacher in a public college, I know exactly how my administration would interpret such a bill. We already struggle with the administration over any instruction that is deemed controversial by students (which covers almost the entirety of my classes, since I teach Environmental Science in a deep red state that has passed rules against using global warming as an explanation for any odd weather patterns).
If you are right, this is just legislating rights the students already have. They can pray in class, as long as they are not disruptive. They can read their Bible in school if it is their time and not a time when they are supposed to be attending to school work (which is the same rule with reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The God Delusion, or Why Truth Matters). In short, if it is what it sounds like, it is a waste of time and effort. Knowing some of the other things that have happened in Ohio recently, I suspect they are passing it for the precise reason of saying that a student cannot be counted off for saying the earth is only 6000 years old or that the plants were created before the sun. Yeah, waffle words to put a legal fig leaf over the nasty bits, but still…
Screechy –
But isn’t that part of the whole church-state issue that everyone has been fighting over for the past however many decades? Isn’t it the child of RFRA, which secularists consider a terrible law?
As long as it is a pure, open forum, this is true, following Windmar v. Vincent: “by creating a forum, the University does not thereby endorse or promote any of the particular ideas aired there” and therefore the proposed state action would pass all three prongs of the Lemon Test.” Things get trickier when public monies are involved, though.
As iknklast says, this language is a wedge. Its vagueness is intentional. While you have provided your own reasonable interpretation of the text, that same text can certainly be interpreted unreasonably. Given that the people involved are unreasonable, which reading do you think they’ll prefer?
That a student cannot be penalized for the religious content of his or her work is directly contradicted by the obligation to meet “ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance”. A student should be penalized for alternating lines of Shakespeare with the sentences of a history paper. Likewise, a student should be penalized for doing the same with Bible verses in a biology paper. That this bill exempts the religious from penalty treats religion as special, and the Supreme Court has ruled several times against that. (Perhaps most relevantly in Estate of Thornton v. Caldor, Inc and Lee v. Weisman.)
Rob Boston wrote about RFRA recently for Americans United. His view is that RFRA is a reasonable law with some flaws and loopholes, rather than a terrible law.
I’d hazard a guess that how one sees the law may depend on one’s views on Free Exercise. I tend toward the view that religion ought to be a private affair, not something people practice in public, and so public accommodations of religion strike me as questionable. Most of the discussions I’ve had with American secularists have focused Establishment, with explicit dismissal of Free Exercise concerns or even topics, and my “private” impression of religion seems common.
Sackbut, another thing with that is the frequency with which public accommodations of religion often conflict with the secular purposes of our institutions, and in many cases, with the rights of other people, such as the religious accommodations for things like homophobia, refusal to serve women in pharmacies who have birth control or morning after pill prescriptions – hell, the fact that the morning after pill even requires a prescription is an example of religious accommodations interfering with other rights.
iknklast@9 (and partly NiV@11),
I think the worst thing you can say about this statute is that it’s redundant because it’s just declarative of existing law. But it can still be helpful to have a broad body of jurisprudence stated concisely in a state law that you can point an education administrator to.
Will some people intentionally misinterpret it? I suppose. But no more so than those people already misrepresent the law. Theocrats gonna theocrat. I’m skeptical that this law is going to embolden anyone to do X, who wasn’t already prepared to insist upon a constitutional right to do X. A state statute can’t trump the federal constitution, so the principals applied in, say, Kitzmiller v. Dover, are still valid.
Ophelia@10,
If you’ll permit some crude oversimplification: the First Amendment prohibits discriminating against religious views. You don’t need a RFRA for that. RFRAs (I’m using the plural because the federal statute only applies to the federal government, so many states have enacted their own) go beyond what the Constitution mandates to provide some additional protection against facially neutral laws that impose burdens on religious exercise. (Actually, not just facially neutral, but literally neutral ones.)
Are RFRAs terrible laws? I wouldn’t say so. On balance I think they probably do more harm than good — I’d rather see legislatures and regulatory agencies pass specific religious exemptions/accommodations on a case by case basis rather than having an all-purpose law that punts such decisions to the courts to struggle with. But I think “terrible” would be going too far. Most of the “parade of horribles” that people feared from RFRAs have not come to pass: you can’t discriminate against homosexuals, or commit tax evasion, etc. because you claim your religion requires/forbids it. I suppose the “worst” outcome of RFRA was the Hobby Lobby decision, but it’s not clear whether the majority there would simply have found a First Amendment violation if it couldn’t rely on RFRA.
NiV @11,
Not particularly, at least not under current law. Then you’ve got a statutory requirement (the Equal Access Act) stacked on top of a constitutional one. There’s a few nuances, like school employees not being allowed to lead the groups, but the basic principal of equal access applies. See Bd. of Education v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226 (1990).