MS Passes ‘Student Religious Freedom’ Bill

 MS Passes ‘Student Religious Freedom’ Bill

SECTION 2. Student expression. A public school district shall not discriminate against students or parents on the basis of a religious viewpoint or religious expression.  

Already protected by existing law,,,pointless.

SECTION 3. Religious expression in class assignments. Students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions.  

Again already protected,,,although there are provisions which allow students to give religious answers on assignments, BUT does this mean they have the right to give a religious answer without having it marked wrong?  If a teacher is required to accept those answers, how does this better education?  How does this develop critical thinking skills by maintain a religious dogma?

SECTION 4. Freedom to organize religious groups and activities. Students in public schools may pray or engage in religious activities or religious expression before, during and after the school day in the same manner and to the same extent that students may engage in nonreligious activities or expression. 

 Again already protected,,,

SECTION 5. Limited public forum; school district policy. (1) To ensure that the school district does not discriminate against a student's publicly stated voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint, if any, and to eliminate any actual or perceived affirmative school sponsorship or attribution to the district of a student's expression of a religious viewpoint, if any, a school district shall adopt a policy, which must include the establishment of a limited public forum for student speakers at all school events at which a student is to publicly speak.  [This section is too long to post in its entirety.]

Here is the meat of the matter,,,

They are creating more opportunities for student speakers to proselytize to a captive audience.  The bill declares every such situation to be a limited public forum, meaning that anything said during that time is the expression of the person speaking rather than the school, and it means that the school cannot discriminate against any form of expression (other than obscene or illegal expressions). The model policy also sets limits on which students are allowed to introduce these events.

My question is how is this  “neutral criteria,” in practice it will ensure that the students picked to speak are part of the dominant majority (Christian) and thus that only Christianity will be advocated.  All the enumerated positions are popularity contests among the students. Any potential speaker is thereby pre-filtered through some sort of election process, so only majority viewpoints will survive to be eligible to speak. By design, this limited public forum is not viewpoint-neutral.

SB2633PS.pdf