This is one of those stories where you can’t really tell what’s going on:
A religious liberties law firm accused Plano school officials today of violating students’ constitutional rights by forbidding them to hand out candy canes and pencils with religious messages on them.
Attorneys with the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute said they planned to file a federal lawsuit claiming the district has an unconstitutional censorship policy that victimizes students.
[...]
Last week, Plano school officials sent a letter home requesting that parents not send their children to school with anything green or red this holiday season, Sasser said. All cups, plates, napkins and icing must be white or the children violate the district’s policy, he said.
“These government officials have lost all common sense. This Christmastime and religious censorship is not the law and this discrimination must stop,” said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for Liberty Legal Institute. “Our children are the ones suffering from this discrimination. Our schools are not zones of religious censorship.”
These sue-happy Christian legal funds hype up these stories, and then when the truth comes out, it’s considerably more ambiguous than the lawyers for Jesus Everywhere In Our Public Schools Legal Partners let on in the beginning.
One thing you have to keep in mind about Plano, Texas, is that it is a suburb of Dallas full of fairly conservative and well-off people. Most of the residents of that suburb would probably self-identify as some sort of Christian (and the vast majority of those would be evangelical Protestants), and at the very least suggest that they go to church on a regular basis. The school district personnel come from a similar milieu. They’re not in the business of smashing Christianity out of the schools.
But the one thing that the Liberty Legal Institute probably knows but is deliberately ignoring here is that not every kid in the Plano ISD is an evangelical Christian. In fact, I’ll suggest that one very possible reason for the de-emphasis on Christmas at school is that there are children from other religious traditions at school who neither celebrate Christmas or in fact are hostile to the celebration of Christmas.
One of the ugly little secrets of holiday celebration in the public schools is that Jehovah’s Witness children have to sit out due to their religious beliefs. One of my sister’s kids was in a class where all the Jehovah’s Witness kids in that grade at the school had been placed: it made for an interesting school year as the teacher tried to work around the fact that there were four 2nd graders in the class who could not acknowledge holidays. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that Plano ISD was trying to be accommodating to kids who could not celebrate any holidays whatsoever, or holidays not of their religion.
But the other thing that is not clear from the article is what exactly the hardcore Christian parents were sending to school with their kids. Candy canes with Bible verses and Jesus pencils sound innocuous, but these are not things that you can just pick up at the grocery store; you have to make a special trip to Family Christian or Berean Books or Zondervan to buy these. And I rather doubt that the kiddies were suggesting to their parents that they hand out Jesus pencils; rather, the parents were giving the kids the pencils and telling them to hand them out in school.
Ultimately, this is not about pencils or candy canes, but pencils and candy canes are being used as wedges to prop open the door of the schoolhouse for proselytising. The Liberty Legal Institute is looking for a way to open the door for students proselytising other students where the parents of the target (“non-Christian”) students can’t complain because it’s been legally approved by a judge. So, red and green napkins are a ruse to distract from a more disturbing agenda.