John Leo (Free speech is loser where religion is concerned, Marietta Daily Journal, 20 July 2006) seems to be claiming that the ACLU chooses "'a speech code guaranteeing no one's feelings are hurt'" over religious freedom. I cannot speak for my fellow members of the ACLU, but John Leo's solution includes far more than he’s admitting, and his claim that religious speech is all that is restricted is bogus. 

Leo brushes off as trivial what he calls the "catch-22" in all this, the school system's involvement in editing and controlling what the students can say—but that involvement is at the heart of the matter. If a school official, a paid agent of all taxpayers, can control at all what a student says or doesn't say, then that official must prevent religious proselytizing, racism, wild political fulminations, vicious rudeness, and other speech that some taxpayers may not wish to sponsor. Mere "sensitivity" and hurt feelings aren't the issue here—real liberty for all taxpayers and for the student is at issue.

Leo insists that high school valedictorians "have a clear First Amendment right to say what they think is relevant on the big day." But either there are limits or there aren’t. Leo implies that the valedictorian’s speech is not a “school-sponsored speech” in a “state-sponsored forum.” But if Brittany McComb must be allowed to credit the Lord Jesus Christ for her academic success, then next year's valedictorian must be allowed to be racist or to denounce Christianity or to promote communism or to be sexist or to take the name of the Lord "in vain" or otherwise to speak freely in ways that may make the school administrators—and the taxpaying public—uncomfortable or even outraged. 

John Leo—and all of us—cannot have it both ways.

Contact Ed Buckner

[Ed's article appears as a letter to the editor of the MDJ on August 25]