In the view of constitutional scholars working for Georgia’s Catoosa County school board, the cheerleaders urging on the Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School Warriors football team are the property of the state. The New York Times reports that, “With salaried coaches and the school’s name on their uniforms, the cheerleaders would most likely be considered school-sponsored…” At the urging of their attorneys, the school board ordered the cheerleaders cease displaying Christian banners at Friday night football games, a tradition that began after the attacks on 9/11. Tax dollars collected from parents living in the Catoosa County school district are used as a pretext to stop kids from expressing their faith.
According to the Catoosa County News, Matthew Bryan, an attorney who spoke to the county school board in support of the cheerleaders, said, “Through a series of judicial twist and turns, the restraints on the Congress of the United States are now widely regarded as applying to you. There can be no valid court decision in opposition to the Constitution itself.”
Bryan makes a valid point. The Constitutional convention’s Anti-Federalist members insisted upon including the Constitution’s original ten amendments. They saw them as the citizen’s protection from an all-powerful national government. Federalist Alexander Hamilton argued against the inclusion of these amendments because, in his view, the Constitution gave congress no such power to subvert the liberties of Americans. Boy was he wrong. Now the First Amendment’s congressional restraint against “respecting an establishment of religion” has shifted to the citizen… even down to the high school cheerleader.
School board attorney Renzo Wiggins said he believes the law “requires on the part of the public school system...that it take a neutral stance on the issue of religion.” He further advises Christians to avail themselves of the “free-speech zone” outside the stadium. It never occurs to Wiggins that the very act of confining speech to a “zone,” destroys any pretense of neutrality and, by definition, robs the citizen of his freedom. The courts, therefore, have declared there shall be no other God above government and equates expressions of religious devotion with “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
-- Mr. Curmudgeon
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