Posted on 05/23/2011 3:41:11 PM PDT by NYer
NEW ORLEANS - Baylor University President Ken Starr was among two former U.S. Solicitors General who assisted the Liberty Institute today in presenting oral arguments in one of the nation's most important cases involving free speech. Known nationwide as the "candy cane" case, the outcome of Morgan v. Plano Independent School District will likely determine whether elementary schoolchildren have First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution.
The case was heard by all 17 judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, a rare occurrence reserved for cases of national impact.
According to the Liberty Institute, the case involves several students who were discriminated against because their speech was religious in nature, including a young boy who was singled out and banned from handing out candy cane pens with a religious message at his class "winter" party, a little girl who was threatened for handing out tickets after school to a religious play, and an entire class of kids who were forbidden from writing "Merry Christmas" on holiday cards to American troops serving overseas. On appeal, the government officials are now arguing that elementary students are too young to have First Amendment rights.
Judge Starr, former U.S. Solicitor General from 1989-93 under President George H.W. Bush, and Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General under President George W. Bush, joined the Liberty Institute in arguing for the students.
Judge Starr stated in the argument, "This is 'cold on the docks' unconstitutional. We come in the spirit of Barnette v. West Virginia, that school districts have the responsibility to obey the law."
In a Liberty Institute video about the "candy cane" case, Judge Starr said, "For over a half century, the Supreme Court and other courts have held that schoolchildren have constitutional rights, especially the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and that's what's at stake here. And so a ruling to the effect that schoolchildren don't have those rights would really represent, in my view, a very significant departure from subtle law, and more than that, it just would give enormous power to schools and school districts in ways that are really incompatible with the spirit of liberty that informs a constitutional republic."
The Liberty Institute said that eight groups of diverse political views, from conservative groups to the ACLU, have filed briefs in support of the students.
Liberty Institute is a public policy and non-profit legal firm dedicated to protecting freedoms and strengthening families and specializes in First Amendment and Constitutional cases.
For more information, visit www.libertyinstitute.org.
Audio of the oral argument will be posted online at http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/OralArgumentRecordings.aspx.
ABOUT BAYLOR PRESIDENT KEN STARR
A distinguished academician, lawyer, public servant and fifth-generation Texan, Judge Ken Starr began his service as Baylor University's president on June 1, 2010.
Starr has argued 36 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including 25 cases during his service as Solicitor General of the United States from 1989-93. He previously served as U.S. Circuit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1983-89, law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975-77 and law clerk to Fifth Circuit Judge David W. Dyer from 1973-74. He was appointed to serve as Independent Counsel for five investigations from 1994-99. He practiced law and was a partner at the firms of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP (1974-1981) and Kirkland & Ellis LLP (1993-2010).
Before joining Baylor, Starr served six years as dean and professor at the Pepperdine University School of Law, where he taught Current Constitutional Issues and Civil Procedure. He taught Constitutional Law for 13 years at New York University School of Law, George Mason University School of Law and Chapman Law School. He currently is The Louise L. Morrison Chair of Constitutional Law at Baylor Law School.
Starr earned his BA from George Washington University, an MA from Brown University and his JD from Duke University Law School.
Judge Starr has published more than 25 articles and authored a book in 2002, First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life. His honors include the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service, the Edmund Randolph Award for Outstanding Service in the Department of Justice, the Jefferson Cup Award from the FBI, and the J. Reuben Clark Law Society 2005 Distinguished Service Award.
Ping!
Schools will provide a room for Muslim kids to fall on their face, will allow “gay” kids space to hold their own dating club meetings but pass out a candy cane and its a federal crime.
The world is insane.
ML/NJ
I went to public school in Brooklyn, NY from 1990 to 2004, and never did I ever experience repression like those kids did while in school.
“The world is insane.”
We are insane for letting this happen.
Postmodern German philosophy is irrational and insane.
Our government was based on Enlightenment ideas....the Age of Reason—the Modern Age. The age of Locke and Reid and Common Sense. Our government was designed for reason and logic....(Natural law Theory).
Postmodernism German philosophy is destroying the minds and thinking of our population. Cultural Marxism was designed to destroy the schools and our institutions of marriage and religion (Christianity). It is designed to destroy reason and logic (up is down, homosexual marriage, multiculturalism—no difference between cultures, destroy traditions (demean family, fathers, motherhood, etc.)
This is on purpose to create a communist one world government.
We are insane if we allow the marxists to destroy the greatest country in the history of man and brainwash and condition our children to their one-way allowed to think hedonism (PC) and destroy the idea of God and absolute Truth.
Get your kids out of public schools and turn off the tv and video games.
This is all just dancing around the fact that they should slap the sh*t out of the teacher and fire the school administrators. This particular dance just keeps moving to the left.
Ken Starr is a fink. Given a mountain of evidence against Clinton, he wasted vast amounts of time and money to produce an embarrassing molehill of a prosecution over a laughable charge, guaranteed to fail and humiliate the congress for having the audacity to want to impeach a profoundly criminal offender besmirching the office of the presidency.
As such, that is what he was hired to do. Betray his country by “throwing the game”. From that point, anything his does is suspect for low order duplicity.
In this case, he claims to support the rights of young children. But I suspect that he simply wants to erode the authority of schools and teachers and *others*, acting “in loco parentis” (in place of a parent).
Can children be taught in a situation where discipline is absent?
I a child wants to scream his fool head off in class, is a teacher interfering with their “right” to do so, by asking him to be quiet?
For years, Hillary Clinton campaigned for the “right” of children to sue their parents, and to diminish parental rights in many other ways.
Is that Ken Starr’s real agenda, compatible with his friends, the Clintons?
I’ve often wondered, when did we as parents lose our rights to our children when it comes to schooling? What law give our children to the government? Is it not time to take back our children from the government establishment? I believe it’s time that we understand this mess and take action to demand accountability of our government run schools. Demand an end to the Federal Government Department of Education. Return the power of educating our childrem to the States where it belongs and demand accountability of our schools and our educators.
When you send you kids to government schools.
Missed that on the proofread.
My kid was attending one of the elementary schools when this went down.
This has less to do with kids expressing their religious beliefs than parents using their kids to evangelize through the school system.
Probably 90% of the kids in the school still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It’s absurd to permit parents to misuse/abuse their kids to proselytize on behalf of any religion in school to susceptible children without the knowledge or consent of the parents of the children receiving such “missionary” efforts.
And before the flaming begins, I feel that way about any parent trying to impress their religious views on other people’s kids without knowledge or consent.
That goes for Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.
I’m not saying each religion is the moral equivalent of each other.
I am saying that it is b.s. that this has become a freedom of religion issue.
It has nothing to do with the free practice of religion or free speech and everything to do with sneaky tactics to convert children of different faiths without parental knowledge or consent.
Want to talk to my kid (now a teenager in high school) about religion in school? Fine. Old enough to make decisions on that front. In elementary school, the parents playing missionary by proxy crossed the line. If they had been honest, they would have approached the parents directly.
However, in an age when atheism, Islam and Kwanzaa are imposed, it's outrageous to prevent children from sharing their social heritage.
Yep.
It takes vigilant people to protect our rights and people became lazy and too busy and trusting— being entertained with no time to pay attention to what was really happening with our schools and curricula. We all thought that teachers wanted the best for our children. Many do, but the problem was with the communist unions and the restructuring with a socialist unconstitutional system which includes the DOE which put the nail in the coffin of education. This centralization uses up tons of money and you have a few elites writing all curricula—controlled by Marxists. They put moral relativism into all curricula and demean all values that made this country great—Capitalism, self-reliance, wisdom, religion, monogamy, heterosexual marriage, perseverance, Western culture.
Children were not taught real history and the ideals of our Founding Father were denigrated. Eakmans book, Cloning of the American Mind discusses the methodologies that were used (Pavlov and Skinner) to condition and brainwash children into moral relativism and a conditioning to socialism and to group think. Gato’s Underground History of American Education really goes into the undermining of parents and their authority (much like Hitler had the schools do with the Hitler Youth).
The curricula according to Eakman is intentionally designed to dumb down children—to create cognitive dissonance — to destroy the possibility of logical thinking. (Marxism can’t compete with reason). She proves it by the words of the creators of the curricula themselves. When parents complain about their curricula—they just change the name of it and continue teaching it....like Goals 2000 became something new under Bush. It is evil what these academics are intentionally doing to the minds of our children.
They control through our education system who can teach....those who don’t think correctly, don’t graduate. You have to think Politically Correctly—which comes directly from cultural Marxism to destroy knowledge-—Multiculturalism, Values Clarification, Diversity, Tolerance, etc. are all ways to destroy true knowledge—create lies as truth—to create cognitive dissonance and a horrible foundation, so children have no way to build knowledge.
Prior to Dewey’s Prussian design for education....we had the McGuffey Readers which were filled with and underscored parent’s values which was the Christian paradigm, with the mention of God and the Lord and how children needed to respect all of God’s creation.
Dewey’s texts demeaned our Founding Fathers, and traditions and history and forbid the mention of God and moral character development which was the most important aspect of schools besides the 3 R’s according to George Washington and all the Founders. All Biblical principles were taught, and never demeaned and ridiculed like they do today claiming bigotry, etc.
We need to abolish unions and DOE and get to parental control of education. Parent’s should hire and fire the teachers and decide the curricula—NO INTERMEDIARIES—and believe me....you need to read all school texts carefully and look for the subtle propaganda that undermines all the principles that created this great country.
Ideology is the most important thing you pass on to your children. The Christian Capitalist paradigm was the most free and successful in history and should be the model for this country which it was for 200 years until the Postmodern German socialist Philosophy came over the Atlantic and infected the universities with their atheism and socialism in the 1900’s. Both ideas combined to contribute to the most vile ideologies in the history of the world used to create Russia, socialist Germany, and communist China.
an entire class of kids who were forbidden from writing "Merry Christmas" on holiday cards to American troops serving overseas.
Yeah, .. you're probably right.
students do not "shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse door."
I nominate you for Post of the Day!
This crap makes me want to scream! What has happened to America when government attempts to squelch religion? I pray for an end to public schools as we know them. And I pray for an end to dept. of education bureaucrats!
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