Texas Activist Weaponizes Law Requiring Religious Posters In Schools Against Its Fans

Culture

from the unintended-consequences dept

Secularists teaching the state of Texas a lesson in unintended consequences appears to be becoming something of a theme. To be fair, this is a problem of Texas’ own making, as the state continues to churn out laws that aren’t just conservative, which would be fine, but at least questionable from a constitutionality standpoint. The Union being in the state it is, legal challenges may not currently be the best route to go right now, at least when compared with what is essentially a jaunty bit of fuckery designed to point out the flaws in these laws. We saw a recent example of that with secularists, I presume, utilizing the state’s desire to ban naughty books that contain certain categories of content to also get the Christian Bible banned for the same reason. This is how the law of unintended consequences works, after all.

Yet another hilariously stupid law passed a year or so ago in Texas requires any public school to display signs proclaiming “In God We Trust”, so long as they are donated by 3rd parties, have the phrase at the top of the poster, the U.S. flag directly below the phrase, and the Texas flag shown somewhere as well. The poster can also not include any other words or messaging. Why all those rules? Well, because Texas wanted to make sure nobody could create ironic posters using the phrase in order to poke fun at, or challenge, the conservative religious groups that want a certain flavor of messaging to appear in public schools.

Unfortunately, secularists are quite creative. Chaz Stephens is an atheist activist based out of Florida and known for public stunts. Chaz initially wanted to donate posters that referenced Satan instead of God, which is fairly normal atheist fare these days. Unfortunately, the law wouldn’t allow that. So… how to still get the point across to the largely conservative Christian Texas groups flooding public schools with religious messaging? Well…

That poster follows the law in every respect. There’s an American flag below the wording. There’s a Texas flag on the poster. And the only words that appear on it are “In God We Trust” (possibly conjugated incorrectly, but you know). The only difference between this and other posters is that the words are in Arabic. There is no reason why any school or the state should reject this poster. In fact, the Texas law requires it to be accepted.

The obvious question is: Will it work? Will schools accept these donated posters? The truth is they don’t have a choice in the matter. If the posters are donated and meet the legal specifications, they must go up. The schools would be violating the law by rejecting his offer. That is, assuming they don’t have a Christian sign up already.

Even if Texas Republicans insist the English-language version of the poster was implied, that’s not what the law says. And if there’s one thing we know about conservatives, it’s that they’re huge fans of strict constructionism. We shouldn’t assume anything that’s not literally written into the law.

Argue against this all you want, but schools should be forced to display that poster, per the law. And any pushback from local citizens would represent a desire to move away from that law. And pushback there will be, you can be sure, should any of those posters be put up.

Now, we could keep playing this game of chicanery, I suppose. But it would be far better if the religous would be satisfied with keeping religion within the family and the church, and not attempting to encroach on secular schools.

Filed Under: free speech, religious posters, schools, texas