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Should schools be allowed to ban religious symbols to protect against gang violence?
It’s not unusual for schools to ban students from wearing gang symbols. If students are unable to outwardly identify with rival groups when they are in school, it lessens the potential for school violence. But what happens when a gang symbol is a religious symbol as well?
Do your First Amendment rights stop at school? No and yes. When the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines that students were permitted to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But the issue of free speech at school is more complicated than that, since school officials are responsible for maintaining an orderly environment. The Tinker justices ruled that symbolic expression can be restricted when it is disruptive or poses a clear and present danger to the school environment. The principals in these recent cases believe that speech restriction applies to rosaries when used as gang symbols. |
When a Colorado Springs school district found out that gangs in the Midwest had started adopting Catholic rosary beads and crosses as symbols of their allegiance, it decided to clamp down. Over the summer, it voted to allow each school in the District 11 – elementary schools up to high school – to decide individually whether it wanted to ban children from wearing crosses and rosaries outside their clothing during school hours.
One school, Mann Middle, says students who want to wear rosaries as a symbol of their Catholic faith must do so underneath their clothing. This did not sit well with Rebekah Gostnell. The parent of a 13-year-old student named Cainan spoke up to the school district and in the local press about the restriction.
“He loves Jesus and should be able to wear (a Christian symbol) outwardly as he chooses,” Gostnell said in the Colorado Springs Gazette. “I don’t think it’s right to make some people hide their religious beliefs and allow others to show their religious beliefs.”
Jordan Sekulow, a human rights attorney at the American Center for Law, told the Gazette that unless there is evidence that a student is part of whichever gang wears religious symbols, that student has a constitutional right under the First Amendment to wear a cross to school.
A similar case in Schenectady, N.Y., drew a lawsuit after seventh grader Raymond Hosier was repeatedly suspended for wearing his rosary to school. The school district eventually lifted its ban on rosary beads.
What do you think?
Should schools be allowed to ban religious symbols to protect against gang violence? Does it equate to making students hide their religious beliefs, as Rebekah Gostnell said? Or is letting students wear their rosaries under their clothing a safe compromise? Should schools first have evidence that the student is in a gang before restricting what he or she wears? Join the discussion!
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