Christian school had every right to expel student who posed with rainbow cake

The other day I picked up my younger grandson, Harry, 5, from school.

As we rode along he, apropos of nothing, started lecturing me about the special holiness of the Virgin Mary.

I never have any idea what will come out of Harry’s mouth next, but our family are low-church—very low-church—Protestants, and have been for hundreds of years, and in our theology Mary is no more special than any other follower of Jesus.

For a moment I couldn’t figure out where Harry had gotten this other idea.

Until it hit me that, oh, wait, his school is Catholic. The kids even go to Mass. (Harry famously fell into the holy water once, which is how I learned about the Masses.)

I assumed he’d been taught about Mary at school.

It’s an excellent school and Harry loves it, and I’m grateful he’s there.

Still, not all of its beliefs would necessarily jibe with mine.

But if I were paying his tuition, which I’m not, I wouldn’t make a fuss about the finer points of Catholic theology or much of anything else the school said or did unless I believed the students’ lives were in danger.

If the school taught something so off-the-wall I couldn’t deal with it, I’d quietly withdraw Harry and enroll him elsewhere.

You know why? It’s a private school. It’s a church school. It’s their house, their rules.

If you don’t want a kid to encounter Catholicism, don’t send him to a Catholic school.

I thought about this recently while following the media dustup about another kind of Christian school, this one in Louisville. A Protestant, evangelical school.

Whitefield Academy discovered itself in an uncomfortable spotlight after it expelled a 15-year-old freshman, supposedly for posing with gay pride symbols.

Kimberly Alford told journalists that Whitefield kicked out her daughter over a December social media post. A photograph showed the girl wearing a sweater that had a rainbow design and sitting by a colorful birthday cake decorated in a rainbow pattern. (On Thursday, Alford sued the school over the expulsion.)

A rainbow flag often is used as a symbol of LGBTQ pride and rights, although Alford insisted that wasn’t why her daughter wore the sweater or had the cake.

Whitefield Academy’s handbook says the school doesn’t condone, among other things, “sexual immorality, homosexual orientation or the inability to support Biblical standards of right and wrong,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

The teenager’s expulsion drew the scrutiny of local and national media, including the Courier-Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader and major television networks.

As the story unfolded over several days, it became less clear how big a role the rainbow photo actually played in the expulsion.

The school said the freshman had violated its student code “numerous times,” ABC News reported. ABC said Kimberly Alford agreed her daughter had been in trouble earlier for shaving the sides of her head and for bringing an e-cigarette on campus.

In other words, Whitefield may have ejected a kid for expressing what its leaders took to be sympathies toward the LGBTQ community, or it may have been that a chronic rebel with a laundry list of infractions finally pushed administrators too far. I don’t know.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s say it was the former.

Agree or disagree with what it did, Whitefield Academy was within its rights. Let me be clear. I’m not arguing that Whitefield should have expelled this young woman, if her only violation of its code was posing with rainbow symbols. I don’t believe she should have been expelled even if she’d actually, openly declared herself to be gay. I’m not in favor of discrimination, and especially not in discrimination against kids. I’m saying the school was within its constitutionally protected rights.

Religion is protected—wisely, explicitly—by the First Amendment, alongside our other core freedoms of speech, the press, petition and assembly.

You can’t compel anyone to profess belief in God or attend a church, synagogue or mosque.

But those who do believe get to practice their faith pretty much as they see fit, whether or not their tenets are popular.

They can preach for or against the Virgin Mary. They can believe gay people are sinful—or divorced people or tattooed people or freckled people—or they can believe absolutely everybody on Earth is OK and going straight to heaven regardless. They can serve communion to any joker who walks in off the street or to no one except their chosen few.

As long as they’re not beheading supposed infidels or planting bombs or denying people life-saving emergency services, they’re allowed to practice as they see fit, with whomever they see as sufficiently holy. And they’re free to reject those they see as unfit.

If you don’t like what they believe—if you really, really don’t like it, if you think it’s odious—that’s your right. You’re free, too. Free to not worship with them.

But you can’t expect them to quit offending you with their preaching or their in-house rules or their educational standards. There’s no constitutional protection against being offended.

If your child can’t or won’t abide by a religious school’s tenets, don’t pay good money to send her there. Why would you? She can go to a perfectly fine public school for free and might be much happier.

Contributing columnist Paul Prather can be reached at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 9:49 AM with the headline "Christian school had every right to expel student who posed with rainbow cake."