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Football team forced to remove crosses from helmets

apdst said:
The players chose to display those crosses, not the school.
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And they neither asked for nor received school permission? Are the players free to display whatever they want, or do they need the school's approval?
 
pinqy said:
And they neither asked for nor received school permission? Are the players free to display whatever they want, or do they need the school's approval?
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I don't believe they need the school's permission.
 
Bigfoot 88 said:
These militant atheists have failed at life. I pity them. And they don't have true respect for liberty, nor do they interpret the Constitution with integrity.
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Just wait til the Saints have to change their name. :roll:
 
apdst said:
I don't believe they need the school's permission.
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And this is based on???? I've never heard of any school allowing players to put whatever they want on their uniforms. I doubt you have, either. So why do you think this school is different?
 
pinqy said:
No it's not a private entity. It is a state-owned school.


Is it freedom of? If the only way they can wear the crosses is specific approval by the school, then it's not freedom of religion. And the majority can not be given special rights that don't equally apply to the minority.

If the school had the rule that players could put whatever they wanted (as long as it was not obscene or offensive etc) then there would be no issues with the crosses.
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So show the rules.
 
j-mac said:
Who was forced to display the cross? And by whom?
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Any team member who had to wear a helmet with a cross on it. They had no choice in the matter. There was no crossless helmet option, and even if there had been, peer pressure is an enormous factor. Whoever permitted the crosses be put on the team's helmets forced all of the team to comply. The reverse of the OP in fact.
 
Manc Skipper said:
Any team member who had to wear a helmet with a cross on it. They had no choice in the matter. There was no crossless helmet option, and even if there had been, peer pressure is an enormous factor. Whoever permitted the crosses be put on the team's helmets forced all of the team to comply. The reverse of the OP in fact.
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Where's your evidence that any team member was force, against his will, contrary to his beliefs, to display a cross on his helmet?
 
apdst said:
Where's your evidence that any team member was force, against his will, contrary to his beliefs, to display a cross on his helmet?
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I too would like to see some evidence. I get the feeling it won't be forthcoming.
 
pinqy said:
No one is arguing differently. The question is whether or not this case is of individual student civil rights, or unconstitutional endorsement by the school.
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How could players voluntarily displaying a small cross on their helmets be construed as congress making a law respecting an establishment of religion? Good grief.
 
Manc Skipper said:
Anyone who had to wear it and had no choice. It's very simple but you still don't get it.
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Your evidence that anyone was acting against there will?...for the second time. What part of that don't you get?
 
j-mac said:
Not saying it isn't in writing somewhere, but could you provide any proof that it is against university or NCAA rules in writing to not do what they did? If not they could possibly have a counter suit on 1st amendment grounds.
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they have as much right to affix their choice of a cross emblem on the state university owned helmet as i have placing a satanic emblem on your automobile
 
justabubba said:
they have as much right to affix their choice of a cross emblem on the state university owned helmet as i have placing a satanic emblem on your automobile
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Worst analogy EVER. It doesn't even make sense.
 
Manc Skipper said:
Any team member who had to wear a helmet with a cross on it. They had no choice in the matter.
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Wrong you are...Read the article again....

"Barry Weyer, Sr., told me that the players and coaches voluntarily decided to memorialize his son and Owens.

“The players knew they were both Christians so they decided to use the cross along with their initials,” he said. “They wanted to carry the spirits of Markel and Barry Don onto the field for one more season.”

The players wanted this symbol on their helmets.

and even if there had been, peer pressure is an enormous factor.
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However, it wasn't a player that complained...Rather some snotty lawyer in the stands at the TN game...No one for two weeks said a word about it, and this one Jerk gets his panties in a bunch and causes trouble....He should have left the game if he couldn't bear to watch the crosses kick his teams arse.

Whoever permitted the crosses be put on the team's helmets forced all of the team to comply.
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No one was "forced"... The team wanted to show support for two fallen members, and the coach allowed them to show their unity with them...If you can produce just one player that says he didn't want to wear the cross then I'll stand corrected, but your misrepresentation of this is just plain dishonest.
 
matchlight said:
The Supreme Court decisions on this kind of thing are all over the map. It's very hard to extract rules and principles from them, because each case seems to turn on details peculiar to it, without much rhyme or reason. Also, these cases often have involved both Free Speech Clause and Establishment Clause issues, and it's sometimes hard to understand why the analysis in a case was based on one clause instead of the other. The decisions, like the Court's decisions about religious displays in public places, make too much fuss about very minor details and at times seem arbitrary. The Court goes one way this time, the other way the next, and it's often very hard to see what made the difference.

I think this jurisprudence could and should be simplified and made more rational by allowing much more religious expression in these situations. Let the Court stop making a production of every little incident. This country was founded by English Protestants, and the considerable interplay between religion and government that's given rise to in our history doesn't seem to have harmed us much. As the dissenters noted in Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Jane Doe, a 2000 decision involving student-initiated prayers before high school football games, "George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of 'public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God....'"

All this stuff is a fairly recent development--until 1947, any state that wanted to could have declared its own official religion. A century and a half passed before the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was first applied to the states. This country was at least as religious as today during that long period, which saw a Civil War, two World Wars, and the Great Depression, among other social stresses. But even so, our history does not show state governments turning into theocracies. The current hypervigilance is silly and uncalled for. It is also a sign of the bitter animosity many people who ironically like to see themselves as more-tolerant-than-thou harbor toward all things religious.
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You seem to be saying that just a little violation of the First Amendment is harmless and we should just turn our heads. Just a "little" disagreement over an "unimportant" ("unimportant" to whom?) matter can lead to wars and needless deaths, as it did in the Philadelphia Bible wars. The disagreement was over which version of the Bible would be read in public classrooms. While the matter of displaying some religious symbols on public property may SEEM trivial at times, we can see that Christian Nationalists, Dominionists, and others of the same mind but different names, will use that public display to justify further violations.


A Nineteenth-Century Trojan Horse Plot: The Philadelphia Bible Riots

but Philadelphia in 1844: the year of the Bible Riots, two of the deadliest outbreaks of street violence before the Civil War. The ‘foreigners’ meanwhile were not British Asians but Irish Catholics. <<<snip>>>>

Then, as now, schools became a battleground. 1 The northern states of the U.S. built publicly-funded school systems four decades before Britain. Proponents of the public schools saw them as handmaidens of republican government: training grounds for a generation of future citizens. It is no coincidence, indeed, that their emergence closely followed the rewriting of suffrage laws to enfranchise the vast majority of white men. When one Catholic leader in a heavily Irish suburb of Philadelphia tried to shield his constituents’ children from school readings of the King James Bible, then, he provoked outrage, for in the mind of Protestants, the King James was as crucial to the government of a true republic as a balanced constitution. In the fertile imagination of anti-immigrant nativists a practical suggestion soon became a dastardly and deep-rooted plot to destroy American liberty.

Violence soon followed. Angry locals in the Irish suburb broke up a small gathering of nativists on 3 May. Three days later, the Protestants gathered again in larger numbers, and a gunfight broke out. The first to fall was an eighteen-year old nativist, George Shiffler, who supposedly fell clasping the Stars and Stripes. Over the following days, an anti-immigrant mob avenged Shiffler’s death by burning Catholic churches, torching homes, and desecrating graves. Eventually state militia and Federal troops imposed order through Martial Law, though the local authorities placed most of the blame on the city’s Catholics. Coupled with further violence in July, more than two dozen Philadelphians – both native- and foreign-born – lost their lives in the Bible Riots. A few months later, in municipal elections, new nativist parties swept to power across much of the urban North. 2
 
OKgrannie said:
You seem to be saying that just a little violation of the First Amendment is harmless and we should just turn our heads. Just a "little" disagreement over an "unimportant" ("unimportant" to whom?) matter can lead to wars and needless deaths, as it did in the Philadelphia Bible wars. The disagreement was over which version of the Bible would be read in public classrooms. While the matter of displaying some religious symbols on public property may SEEM trivial at times, we can see that Christian Nationalists, Dominionists, and others of the same mind but different names, will use that public display to justify further violations.


A Nineteenth-Century Trojan Horse Plot: The Philadelphia Bible Riots

but Philadelphia in 1844: the year of the Bible Riots, two of the deadliest outbreaks of street violence before the Civil War. The ‘foreigners’ meanwhile were not British Asians but Irish Catholics. <<<snip>>>>

Then, as now, schools became a battleground. 1 The northern states of the U.S. built publicly-funded school systems four decades before Britain. Proponents of the public schools saw them as handmaidens of republican government: training grounds for a generation of future citizens. It is no coincidence, indeed, that their emergence closely followed the rewriting of suffrage laws to enfranchise the vast majority of white men. When one Catholic leader in a heavily Irish suburb of Philadelphia tried to shield his constituents’ children from school readings of the King James Bible, then, he provoked outrage, for in the mind of Protestants, the King James was as crucial to the government of a true republic as a balanced constitution. In the fertile imagination of anti-immigrant nativists a practical suggestion soon became a dastardly and deep-rooted plot to destroy American liberty.

Violence soon followed. Angry locals in the Irish suburb broke up a small gathering of nativists on 3 May. Three days later, the Protestants gathered again in larger numbers, and a gunfight broke out. The first to fall was an eighteen-year old nativist, George Shiffler, who supposedly fell clasping the Stars and Stripes. Over the following days, an anti-immigrant mob avenged Shiffler’s death by burning Catholic churches, torching homes, and desecrating graves. Eventually state militia and Federal troops imposed order through Martial Law, though the local authorities placed most of the blame on the city’s Catholics. Coupled with further violence in July, more than two dozen Philadelphians – both native- and foreign-born – lost their lives in the Bible Riots. A few months later, in municipal elections, new nativist parties swept to power across much of the urban North. 2
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Interesting, thanks!
 
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