Supreme Court denies appeal in Michigan religious freedom case

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear an appeal in a case the Messenger reported on earlier this year.

The appeal was filed on behalf of a student in a public school in Saginaw who was told he could not sell religiously-themed items in a school project where students had to create products and sell them in an artificial marketplace. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on behalf of the school, saying:

“The school’s desire to avoid having its curricular event offend other children or their parents, and to avoid subjecting young children to an unsolicited religious promotional message that might conflict with what they are taught at home, qualifies as a valid educational purpose.”

But as I wrote in a commentary after the appeals court handed down its ruling, this is unsound reasoning. The situation is legally indistinguishable from one in which a student chooses to sing a religious song at a talent show, paint a religiously-themed picture for art class or write a biography of a religious figure for an English class, all of which the courts have rightly said are constitutionally protected despite the fact that some other student might find them offensive or in conflict with what they were taught at home.

Using such concerns as a basis for censorship is not only constitutionally dubious, it is highly dangerous. The potential for offense does not negate the First Amendment. If the government can use the possibility that a listener might be offended as a reason to censor speech, the First Amendment becomes utterly meaningless. It was written to protect controversial, and thus potentially offensive, speech. Speech that has no potential of offending someone does not need such protection because no one would be motivated to censor it. This is precisely the wrong message to send to our schoolchildren.