Until 2009, Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe cheerleaders – working on their own initiative and without government funds – painted signs with Bible verses through which the high school’s football team burst onto the field. The banners had existed innocuously for decades.
Then the usual nonsense prevailed and the signs were banned as unconstitutional – on the weird theory that students’ voluntary religious expression must be censored at school. The ban continues today.
“We corrected our signs and followed the Constitution, so we are just maintaining that this year,” new principal Terry Vandiver recently told the Times Free Press.
Alas, what needed “correction” wasn’t the signs but the peculiar view that the cheerleaders magically became agents of the government when they donned their uniforms – and thus could be denied their First Amendment rights at extracurricular functions. Yes, good reader, that was the excuse used to justify the censorship: that the cheerleaders were somehow official representatives of the government. Following that misty hypothesis to its logical conclusion, the banners presumably amounted to a congressional establishment of religion, which the First Amendment forbids.
If you’re having trouble grasping the censors’ argument, well, that’s kinda the point: It doesn’t make sense. LFO isn’t following the Constitution, it’s violating it to appease a handful of malcontents whom the banners never harmed.