From today's Enquirer, no less:
Oak Hills student missed lesson
Editorials
Oak Hills High School was right to give student Eric Bast a five-day suspension last week for distributing more than 3,000 copies of a religious letter through the school system. Unfortunately, a lot of people, including the young man responsible for the incident, seem not to have learned the importance of this civics lesson.
Bast misused the school's internal mail system to distribute his evangelical Christian message. He admits he intentionally bypassed school rules about needing to have mass distributions approved. He sealed the letters in envelopes bearing each student's name and distributed them in bundles through the school's homerooms during school hours. Many teachers apparently passed them out thinking they had come from the school district.
Bast, an honor student, apologized and accepted his punishment. But on his Web site (lettertomyfriends.com), Bast said he willingly disobeyed school rules and sent the letters because he believed that if he asked for permission he would have been turned down.
"The rules I violated were not anything to do with content of the letter but were about passing of pamphlets or leaflets without school permission," Bast wrote on the site. "I did not get school permission because I was afraid that if I asked the school and they said that I couldn't do it then it would be over and I could not do this awesome thing."
He got it only half right. It is true that bypassing the screening process was a serious violation. Although his message was probably considered benign by most people, the content of Bast's sneak letters could just as easily have included anything from hate speech to a private business solicitation - none of which would have been appropriate. But Bast is wrong if he thinks the content of his letters was not part of the problem.
Oak Hills is a public school. It is not in the business of promoting a particular religion, but that is exactly what Bast tried to trick the district into doing. This is a matter of religious freedom - the freedom not to have the schools push a particular religious doctrine at the students. A public school's one mission about religion is to teach that in this country we respect the right of individuals to worship as they choose, not as the government tells them they should.
What were students who don't believe as Bast does supposed to think when their teachers handed them his religious tract at the start of the school day?
This wasn't an innocent misunderstanding. Bast's parents told him to be sure he followed school rules in passing out the letters.
Bast and the friends who helped him stuff the envelopes and sneak them past the school administrators are free to worship as they wish. They can pass out their literature before or after school. Between classes they can tell all their friends what they believe and why. But Bast cannot expect the school district to distribute his message for him.
The district was right to punish him for trying.
