Written by Don Byrd
Proposed legislation in Utah offers to protect the religious exercise of public school students and other forms of religious expression at school events. Modeled after a similar law in Mississippi, State Senator Todd Weiler’s bill is his effort to “basically [affirm] religious freedoms of students and public school and [teach] educators how to protect students’ rights.”
As an op-ed in today’s Salt Lake Tribune notes, however, most of the rights Weiler’s bill would “affirm” are already well-protected by existing law and the rest would just create problems.
Under federal policy, as guided and interpreted by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings, individual public school students unquestionably have the right to follow any religion they wish, use religious topics as the basis for class assignments, promote religious ideas on their clothing, distribute literature or just share the good news at the lunch table, as long as they do not violate religiously neutral rules established to keep the school day focused on instruction and protect any student from being harassed.
Those protections are what most of the Mississippi law — and Weiler’s bill — would redundantly guarantee.
So, what’s the harm in passing a law that is redundant? For one thing, Weiler’s proposal would do more than just reiterate current protections. Read all about it.
