The next time you point the long
finger of justified accusation at any organization in the never-ending attack
on one of America’s most sacred rights — freedom of speech — take your sights
off the federal government and point it at a far more innocuous-seeming enemy:
Wisconsin’s very own Tomah High School.

At the center of a controversy that
has metamorphosed into a lawsuit is a supremely uninteresting landscape
painting with a cross as its centerpiece and a quote that reads “John 3:16, a
sign of love.” Hardly indicative of a young Pat Robertson.

Julie Millin, the student’s art
teacher, disagreed. Based on the infantile argument that some remarks were
being made about the student’s drawing, Ms. Millin asked him to remove the
religious references. When he refused, Ms. Millin gave him a zero on the
project and showed him a policy he signed at the beginning of the semester,
prohibiting any students from displaying their religious beliefs in their
artwork.

The student, in what I would like to
believe was more an impassioned defense of his freedom of expression than his
religious convictions, tore the policy up in Ms. Millin’s face. Cale Jackson,
the boy’s principal, then proceeded to inform the young man that his drawings
infringed on the rights of other students — and gave him the customary
detentions. After the student, with the aid of the Christian Alliance Defense
Fund, filed a suit, the district issued a press release which argued the school
must not be seen as “endorsing any particular religious viewpoint.”

The “right” of students to learn in
an entirely sterile, secular environment is more of a privilege than anything,
and it is a privilege entirely contingent on students being so subdued as to
never speak or produce something which may affront his or her peers. And it is
frankly absurd to think that a school endorses every single intellectual
product of its students.

Perhaps the most disturbing
oversight on Tomah’s part, however, is what they allowed in the class — two
pictures of what is undoubtedly some form of demon, fangs glistening
malevolently. Or perhaps, if one is searching for displays of hypocrisy, it is
the painting of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Man” displayed prominently at
the entrance to the school. And finally there is the picture of a six-armed
Hindu deity in the school’s hallway. Why Satan, Michelangelo’s clearly theistic
artwork or a Hindu god are somehow more appropriate than a picture of a
landscape with a reference to Christian scripture is beyond me.

The school’s argument, ignorant as
it is of Tinker v. Des Moines, seems to
be centered on the fact that display of religion is appropriate so long as it
is regarded as a relic. The moment a student’s religion assumes a tangible
significance, becoming something worthy of expression — in this case through
art — it becomes something heinous, something to be hushed up and closeted away
before the scandalized murmurs continue. It is worth admitting that
Christianity — and for that matter, religion as a concept — can be taken to the
most absurd lengths human beings are capable of. But by the same token, it is
impossible to imagine how “A message of peace” comes anywhere near the obscene
brand of fundamentalist hatred spewed by, for example, the Westboro Baptist
Church.

The example of Tomah High School
reminds us that freedom of speech is unlikely to be abridged by a confederacy
of dunces placed in the highest offices of our national government. On the
contrary, such an abridgement would come from those who know us best — our teachers,
our peers and our friends, horrified that in the exercise of such freedoms we
may discover that we have the power to contradict one another.

Tomah also teaches us that at the
moment when personal advancement by means of art is contingent upon the signing
away of one’s rights, that at the moment when teachers inform their students
that from eight to three on weekdays the First Amendment is not only limited,
but has ceased to exist, we are unabashedly engaging in the basest form of
tyranny.

I sincerely wish there was a world
in which one could indicate with civility that claiming one can voluntarily
waive their rights as a human being was something other than morally repugnant.
But there is no such world.

Sam Clegg ([email protected])
is a freshman majoring in political science and economics.