Woman can give out religious literature at school

FORT WORTH - A Fort Worth grandmother can resume handing out religious literature to students outside Crowley High School, as long as she doesn't block a section of sidewalk where students board school buses.

That agreement, announced Monday, is expected to end a federal lawsuit by Janice Colston against Crowley school officials, who barred her in April 2005 from distributing pamphlets on the sidewalk in front of the school.

Lawyers for Colston and the school district filed a joint dismissal motion last week in U.S. District Court. Judge Terry Means is expected to approve the settlement.

When contacted Monday, Colston, who won a $3,000 settlement from the Fort Worth school district in 2004 in a similar case, said she didn't want to discuss the Crowley agreement.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/14806705.htm

handing out propaganda or religious materials to my kids...by allowing this...they are opening the doors for military recruiters and any other group left or right.....schools are supposed to be safe havens for kids....

Seriously...I am sick of them forcing their ideology down everyone's throats....

The gay singer that was attacked in New York was attacked by Rush listeners who are teens....they repeatedly kicked him in the face and broke his jaw...he can't work....this is * America folks......

and not just on the sidewalks in front.

Thanks to NLCB, parents are required to "opt out" in order to avoid military recruitment of their high school children. Unless parents opt out, schools are required to provide contact information to the military for recruitment purposes. Even if you opt out, the ASVAB (military aptitude test http://www.military.com/Recruiting/ASVAB/1,13387,,00.html) is mandatory in some high schools and gets the military the same information that you have chosen to forbid the school from providing.

Colleges, even those which have non-discrimination policies banning on campus recruitment by businesses which discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, cannot bar military recruiters from campus without losing all federal funding.

capacity; it doesn't make what they stand for better, but it does make them far more trackable, if something happens with a child and they're responsible. From the article, it sounds like anyone will now be able to distribute literature - how can they possibly restrict it to just one person? I personally would not want the general public allowed unlimited access to school grounds - there are too many people with problems out there.

to military recruiters by pointing out that the door is already wide open. Far too many parents of high school students do not know that schools are required to provide personal information to the military until their home begins being bombarded by junk mail and ceaseless phone calls from military recruiters.

With respect to the different point you are making, even if I agree with your concern about permitting anyone access to school grounds, it isn't clear to me from the article that the sidewalk is on school property - so I am not sure that the decision impacts access to school grounds at all (without reading the court decision - newspapers are notoriously bad at summarizing case decisions). If the sidewalk is adjacent the street it is not necessarily "school grounds." In most places, sidewalks and the chunk of land between the sidewalk and the street are in the public right of way rather than being owned by the property owner (whether the property is school, business, or homeowner). Generally you cannot permit people from occupying public sidewalks unless they are obstructing traffic. As someone who supports a weekly death penalty vigil which takes place on a public sidewalk, I would have had grave free speech concerns about the decision if it restricted free speech access to public sidewalks just because the sidewalk happen to be near a school.

other areas, even if there are sidewalks, etc. - if school kids need to cross them to get to buses, etc., public access can be restricted in the interests of child safety.

When I grew up the world was simple...
There were bad men who supposedly lured you in their car with candies.

Don't take candies from strangers!!


Nowadays the warning should be a bit updated.

- No religious brochures
- No recruiting
- Sign nothing
- Shoot first ask later ^^

dad's raping thier daughters, dads offering their little girls for mass rape, guys killing other guys to steal and enslave their wives, spree-killings, massive perversions. damm that is one filthy book!

are there for their own child. They have no business talking to the children or handing out ANYTHING to them without permission from parents. I don't care what she claims to be doing there, in my mind she's a potential child molestor and deserves to be arrested if she doesn't stop harrassing children immediately. :grr:

life.. I just don't want them teaching children. Or being near schools forcing their views on others.

go down to that school and starting handing out literature on Wicca, Buddhism, or some other non-"christian" religion and see what the response is.

...to harass and propagandize small children
walking to or from school.

SHAME on these "evangelists".

literature.

School one day.

Gideons on the sidewalk in front of the school, right at the opening
of the parking lot, giving away their books.

Kid's had to WALK ACROSS THE GRASS to avoid them.

I called to complain, and to my surprise, the Principal
agreed with my outrage and explained that she had done
everything she could to stop them, but that the police
had determined the ghouls were on public property and
within their rights to propagandize eleven-year-olds.
I told her the police might change their tune if I were
to put on a devil suit and pass out copies of "Satan's
Little Hand Book".

In the end, I didn't support fighting tit for tat because
I DON'T WANT TO RECRUIT OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN!!!!!

FOR ANYTHING!

Lynching?

Yep, let's have lots of people of the school sidewalks handing out religious material. Perhaps the community would do something about it then.

I have to admit that when I was a Christian I handed out religious tracts along with candy on Halloween, but I figured responsible parents would go through the candy with their kids and throw them away if they didn't want their kids to have it.

You can't shut her up. She's in a public place. It's her right.

But it's also our right to debate the ideas she's pushing.

If they want to be a shining example for others to "follow" then why aren't they stirring the soup at the local soup kitchen,folding blankets at the shelter,etc? Their idea of being a great Christian is pushing their beliefs on others 24 hours a day. They are so consumed that others cannot be decent human beings unless everyone thinks exactly as they do.:mad:

rather than example.

That'd be the day.

faith of good works. I mean, they literally don't -=- they think it's unchristian. I grew up RC, and that was the mainstay of being Christian: good works, emulating Jesus Christ by doing good for your fellow men and women and children. Most other Christian denominations agree with this, but not the born-agains. I learned this in comparative religion classes, have read this, and have also been told this by many, many Fundamentalists.

They believe the way to Heaven is being born again and "witnessing" 24/7. NOT through good works.

I agree with you 100%, btw.

The church I belonged to did a good job of balancing the faith versus works thing. It's not necessarily either/or.

I drove my husband a little bit crazy when I got "born again" in my 20s. He was raised Catholic and is completely uninterested. I was really happy and wanted to share with everyone what I had discovered. Thank god/dess it was just a phase.

That would be an appropriate response. (Appropriate in the sense of a nice parallelism).

Not all churches are anti-science and pushing creationism.

But handing out "tracts" on evolution outside the fundie churches after Sunday School would be an excellent idea. No parent has the right to bring up children to believe proven truths are lies and to hate science.

Of course those sort of "christians" would happily crucify you for doing so. Just as they'd be the first to lynch Jesus if he turned up and tried to talk some sense into them.

own "religious" literature and see the sparks fly! Maybe it's a good thing my town accepts pagans, I'm trying to cut down on the drama in my life.

I assume it's NOT named after this guy:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alister_Crowley

walked into one of his parties and discribed a cermony where he cut the head of a goat with a sword while it was having sex with his wife.. the guy got way too much spinn as a spiritualist

The religion he founded was a lot cooler than the namby-pamby "neo-pagan" crap that became so popular later on.

I went to a public school in a fairly conservative community (suburban Grand Rapids, MI). We had a mix of liberal, conservative and moderate teachers. They allowed pastors from the community to come in and eat lunch with students from their churches, and also the Young Life staff was given the same privilege. We were allowed to post notices of where the YL meetings were going to be each week, but YL was not allowed in the yearbook.

We had free speech to discuss religion amongst ourselves, and it was assumed that we were responsible and respectful enough to others that no one would have cause to complain. Teachers could not push religious views on us, but were allowed to facilitate conversations with religious themes when appropriate. Of course, we had no official prayer time or teacher-led prayers, but we were allowed to pray with our friends at lunch time, before class started or after school.

We didn't have a lot of religious diversity-most kids were from protestant families, and many were from fundamentalist families. There was one jewish family, no muslims or pagans, and a group of catholics, because the catholic church in Kentwood didn't have a school. Most of the seriously dutch reformed kids went to South Christian.

We did have a baccalaureate service on the Sunday before graduation. Usually, a local pastor gave the address, and there was christian prayer. The only jewish kid in my class attended it and so did his parents-they did not seem offended.

When I was in elementary school, the Gideons gave us each a NT at school. Our parents had to sign a permission slip first, though, for what it's worth.

I'm not sure what I think about this woman's activities. She's not speaking for the school, so there's not really a church/state separation issue here, it's more of an annoyance kind of thing. It bothers me that she sued and got money from a tax-payer funded school district just so she can distribute the tracts or whatever on their grounds. It seems to me that the $3000 she won could have gone for things for better things.

"We did have a baccalaureate service on the Sunday before graduation. Usually, a local pastor gave the address, and there was christian prayer. The only jewish kid in my class attended it and so did his parents-they did not seem offended."

They did not seem offended because us jews are used to this. Every invocation I have ever heard, whether it was at a school, government agency or private business was said "in jesus's name" EVERY SINGLE ONE. In one case in particular I even mentioned to the director of the Agency that it was not appropriate and not consistent with policies/procedures of the State of Arizona to have an openly christian invocation. Nothing ever changed of course.

I was in orchestra, so I went to this service all four years, since I had to play at it the first 3.

the first year, they had a guy from the interdenominational church across the street. It was a somewhat fundie church, but he kept his prayer inclusive, to his credit.

The second year, they had a total evangelical, who was inappropriate.

The third year, the local PBUSA guy spoke, and he was also very inclusive and didn't pray to Jesus.

My senior year, they got a CRC (Christian Reformed Church-"dutch reformed")pastor who was a chaplian at a nursing home. He was also very inappropriate. My mom was really pissed afterwards, too-she has a contest going with her friends about who is the most liberal, so they were all "outraged".

:woohoo: :rofl:

knock on my door.

I don't know about you but I have mezuzim (sp?) on all my doors so these missionaries are either arrogant or ignorant or both, so I don't even bother to answer the door.

not to talk to them. I really don't like it when they knock on my door assuming I want to be "sold" on something as personal as religion. They can leave their literature there or they can assume if I want to talk to them, I might attend their place of worship. It happens here about 4-5 times a year

:hi:

I make the mistake of talking to a JW missionary. Boy was that a mistake, every week without fail this guy would stop by with his ENTIRE family. Cute kids though, all dressed up in suits looking bored.

so if I see a few people walking down the street dressed that way I know to not answer the doorbell. There is a JW church a few blocks away

Should they be allowed to hang out at the school's gates? What if Scientologists want to stand there and invite students to take their personality tests?

...is it a sidewalk that's on the school GROUNDS?

passing out THEIR religious literature in front of that school.

Teeheehee.................