Catholic Student has Rosary Confiscated

Catholic Student has Rosary Confiscated

By Andy H

Manuel Vigil, a student at Thompson Valley High school in Loveland, Colorado, has had his rosary taken from him for the second time. He is a practicing Catholic who finds solace in having the rosary on him to use. The school doesn’t care about his solace – they find it to be a dangerous gang related necklace:

The latest in gang trends, and what the school may choose to ban, varies from year to year. At Thompson Valley High, bandanas and clothing with gang names or symbols are never allowed. At times, certain colors are prohibited if it appears a student is wearing a color to signal gang affiliation.
“It depends on what’s going on in the world,” Johnson said. “You have to pay attention to colors and what they’re doing.”
In Greeley-Evans School District 6, some numbers are banned based on street number gangs, which caused a recent firestorm when a third-grader had a Denver Broncos No. 18 Peyton Manning jersey barred.
Across the country, rosary beads around the neck have been barred in schools because some gangs, including the Sureños and the Latin Kings, wear them that way. If a student wears a rosary around his neck at Thompson Valley High, Johnson said it’s the school’s policy to ask the student why he’s wearing it.
It’s often a case-by-case situation, said Johnson, who said Vigil’s response was simply that he had the right to wear the rosary beads.
“If we determine that something is gang-related, then we have the right to say they can’t wear it, so some of that is subjective,” he said.
While the purpose of the rosary is to aid in prayer and not as a means of fashion, the Rev. Sam Morehead of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Loveland said the church allows wearing rosary beads as a necklace. Particularly in Hispanic culture, Morehead said wearing a rosary around the neck has become an important part of Catholic identity in the past 20 or 30 years.
“It’s actually quite distressing for me personally to hear that something that represents one’s Catholic faith is being seemingly persecuted in the school setting when it is certainly not a symbol of gang membership,” he said.
read more

Let us contrast this attack on religious liberty for a moment with the backbreaking contortions that the public education system performs to explicitly allow Muslim students to wear whatever and pray whenever in school.
In the Liverpool district where I live, there are a few Muslim families with children in the schools that are given time out of class to go to the main office and pray. They are allowed to skip a required class – music – because the music class is apparently not Muslim.
This is happening in other parts of the country as well. In Tennessee, Christian parents are upset that their children were not allowed to pray – in the morning before school started – but Muslim children were allowed to pray on school grounds during school time:

Right now, Christian supporters of school prayer are outraged over an ACLU lawsuit aimed at Wilson County schools.
Part of the argument stems from a “See You at the Pole” prayer event — held around the school flag pole one morning just before school for any one who wanted to attend.
Now, consider this:
During the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan, teachers in Metro Nashville schools were actually ordered to release Muslim students from class at certain times – to go to unused classrooms or offices — so that they could attend to their Muslim prayers.
read more

A news story in USA Today laid out a number of instances of this ridiculous double standard:

Some public schools and universities are granting Muslim requests for prayer times, prayer rooms and ritual foot baths, prompting a debate on whether Islam is being given preferential treatment over other religions.

The University of Michigan at Dearborn is planning to build foot baths for Muslim students who wash their feet before prayer. An elementary school in San Diego created an extra recess period for Muslim pupils to pray.
At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Muslim students using a “meditation space” laid out Muslim prayer rugs and separated men and women in accordance with their Islamic beliefs.
Critics see a double standard and an organized attempt to push public conformance with Islamic law.
“What (school officials) are doing … is to give Muslim students religious benefits that they do not give any other religion right now,” says Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center, an advocacy group for Christians.
read more

The bottom line is that these institutions do this out of fear. The don’t fear Christians – no one does. Christians may come out with a few signs and get a few faces on TV but the anti-Christian lobby arm of the media will help the schools deflect that and the story will go away. The schools do fear Muslims. They know the media will bolster the Muslim message and help keep it active on the news. They know that doing that will allow the controversy to spread internationally. So the right of religious belief and practice only really goes as far as the news cycle allows. It is time to change that.

MORE