On this point I do have a couple of observations:

1. As noted upthread, pre-1995 newspaper articles are in short supply electronically, especially if you are searching the regular web (as opposed to the “deep web,” including propritary periodicals databases).

2. I suspect that many, many of these incidents, if they get on the public radar screen at all, are small blurbs in community newspapers. Many of these have paper archives only. I have helped many library patrons attempting to research events mentioned in local papers, and been confounded by the nonexistence—not unavailability or inaccessibility, but nonexistence—of archives.

I admit to a personal bias on this issue, because the extreme consolidation of local papers in metro areas (Journal Register Co., etc.) means that a bad company policy on accessibility becomes a bad blanket policy across a whole community. If the newspaper website only keeps stories for the last 30 days (for a weekly paper), and there is no electronic database that the local library can subscribe to, there is a de facto walling off of information. It results in a wholesale vanishing of community memory, and it makes it particularly hard to track the progression of muncipal policies or local stories that don’t rise to the attention of the big city paper.

I actually had to resort to keeping paper clippings on one critical environmental issue in my community—not because the local paper’s reporter wasn’t doing her job, because she was faithfully recording the week-to-week events—but because without my own personal files, I would have had no way to document the corporation’s changing story and rationale without reviewing hundreds of hours of zoning-hearing video footage. (Non-real-life example: “In March 2004, the company said the spill had been completely cleaned up. Now, in Aug. 2005, they’re acting as though they never made such a claim….” etc.)

I don’t know what the statements say, and I’m not interested in reading them. I certainly don’t have any interest in doing an analysis of the merits of the case.

I hear stories all the time, but most of them are nothing like this. I do think that litigators typically explain doctrine to clients before the record is too well developed, and for that reason stories in litigation typically hit the points of the legal doctrine. The details you find implausible may be necessary. Which isn’t to say they aren’t true. Some details are remembering all the brands of brade pads you used 40 years ago, needed to make sure the one last solvent defendant is the one you remember, and others are the things that happened to you last week at school, needed to make out a case so you can go back to reading your bible during reading time at school.

Desperate need Thomas? Are we reading the same comments?

It did not occur to me that Harry might be interested in the case from a legal perspective, rather than trying to check out rumors people had been telling him. If so, I misread him, and I hope this digression has been at least been interesting for others.

Here’s another one:
http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2006/09/no-immunity-for-principal-in-recess.html

I’ve re-read the comments that I responded to, and my opinion hasn’t changed. For some there is a desperate need for these stories to be untrue, and for a mechanism to blame the victims just in case they are true. I confess I don’t know how to describe that phenomenon in terms that are going to make everyone feel good.

I suspect that once you’ve accused people of ignorance and bigotry they feel less inclined to be polite and maybe even to take you seriously than they otherwise might.

As I understand it, these cases typically start with a complaining student, who retains free counsel from a public interest law firm. The counsel writes a letter demanding that the protested act not continue (e.g., you told Johnny he can’t read his bible during lunch, but your general policy allows students to read what they’d like during lunch, and the constitution and federal law prohibit you from barring him from reading the bible in those circumstances, so don’t do it, and confirm to us in writing that you won’t). If that leads to a resolution—which it should, in the ordinary case—then it’s the sort of thing that the lawyer involved might trumpet without anyone in the press reporting it. Only in cases in which the demand letter doesn’t lead to a resolution is there a lawsuit initiated, and only in those cases would I expect there to be press reports. (Unless you think that press releases from the Becket Fund and the Thomas More Law Center are ordinarily picked up by the Chicago Tribune. Or perhaps they pick them up, but only when they refer to schools near Joliet.)

As I said above, I’m surprised by the skepticism. My understanding is that in many places in the American south (Alabama, Texas, Mississippi) there are routine violations of the establishment clause. There aren’t many disputes, because there aren’t many dissenters, and there’s not much press probably for a variety of reasons, at least until a lawsuit. Does anyone find that hard to believe? If the ACLU puts out a press release saying that they’ve settled a dispute with some school district in Louisiana, am I going to be the only one who believes it?

Mrs Tilton—there’s a difference between losing a lawsuit and falsely describing a supposed relationship with a client and the resolution of a dispute with another party. Were I a litigator I imagine I might lose on occasion, without being unethical for taking up a losing cause. I can’t imagine lying about this sort of thing, but when I try I can’t imagine getting away with it. For the reasons I’ve given above I don’t see why we’d expect press reports in the Haymon case. But, given the public statements by the Thomas More Law Center, why hasn’t the school district published a statement refuting or disputing the allegations that they resolved the situation by sending a letter? (Perhaps we should resolve this by contacting the superintendent. His email’s available on the web.)

bianca, I confess I don’t understand your position. Is it that Burton’s father is lying? That he doesn’t know what it means to to tell the truth? What do you find suspect in Mr. Burton’s motives? I assume he had a dispute with his son’s school about his son’s constitutional rights, and he presented the facts as he understood them and in the light most favorable to the assertion of his son’s rights. Whether his son was causing a disruption by reading the bible is relevant, in a limited way, to the question of whether he had a right to read it. If Mr. Burton didn’t make that point, he’d be saying, the school may or may not have violated my son’s rights. Which really isn’t a strong position to take, particularly if he believed that, based on the facts as he knew them, the school did violate his son’s rights. Are you surprised that legal testimony focuses on the legally relevant points? And what about those who repeated his story (presumably including me, since I referenced his name though I don’t know much at all of the story)? What makes them—me—suspect? It can’t be that we get the facts wrong. That happens all the time. Different incidents are conflated and confused. Someone talks about the Burton kid, but moves him to a school near Joliet, confusing him with Haymon. And all sorts of other mistakes occur. Is that evidence that these people don’t know what it means to tell a story accurately? Really? I remember in law school being surprised at the number of my very smart classmates who got cases mixed up, couldn’t keep the facts straight one to the next. Was that a moral failing? Or is that different, because you can imagine yourself doing that, but can’t imagine yourself repeating one of these awful stories about poor Christian kids who couldn’t read the bible at school?

I don’t doubt that “something like” this occurred; the Burton case is evidence for that fact. But, for example, the boy’s father, on the evidence of the transcript linked above, testified regarding the motives of his son’s classmates, saying they only “told on” him because they had overheard the principal’s instructions to the boy. I suppose he intended this to be evidence that what the principal said was illegal, but also that his son was not causing a disruption and would not have bothered anybody if school officials had not interfered. It is this kind of embellishment that makes the stories suspect, for me. I suspect, in other words, the motives and the understanding of the people who are passing around these kinds of stories. I wonder, at times (including when I am told similar stories), whether the people telling them have much idea what it is to tell a story accurately, even at the most basic level of not attributing actions to people falsely.

I should have been clearer. I don’t find the asserted facts themselves implausible. Indeed, as you and I agree, it’s probable that things more or less like this have happened, even if none to date seems to have resulted in any especially big tsuris.

The reason I find the Little Leslie story, as one concrete instance of that sort of thing, implausible is the references to back it up. There is nothing from outside the vacuum jar of rightwing paranoia (or, if you prefer, from outside the community of concerned Christian parents and the advocacy groups that support their cause).

But you’re right, if a Thomas More Center lawyer ever, impossibile dictu, published a website article that was in any way economical with the truth, why, they’d be disbarred straightaway. We’ll all remember those Thomas More lawyers disbarred in the wake of Kitzmiller; I’m sure that put the fear of God into their former colleagues.

But, it is incredible to me that an incident like this could have failed to trigger direct reports in actual newspapers. So, while I remain willing to believe that Christian students sometimes experience slights, some of them quite hurtful, from their peers and even their teachers (just as homosexual, black, latino, female, left-wing, etc students do), I now feel a bit of a chump for having believed versions of this story.

I’ve given you some references to legal proceedings. I haven’t any interest in running a westlaw search on this topic.

Which part of the story of “Little Leslie Haymon” do you find implausible? The underlying assertions? Or the report of the counsel involved, which is that they were asked to write a letter making a complaint, and that they received a satisfactory response from the school district? I find the second part of it overwhelmingly likely, in part because if a lawyer were to publish a description like this and it weren’t true, the lawyer could be disbarred. As for the underlying complaint? Well, I don’t know much of anything about it at all. I wouldn’t be shocked if it were true, for the reasons given above. And yet it’s possible that this child simply made a story up—but it’s no more or less likely in this case, it seems to me, than in any other.

Here’s some reading, for those inclined:
http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/case/5.html
http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/article/213.html
http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/article/182.html
http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/article/188.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201238.html

Pretty much the same thing as the blood libel.

Mrs Krabappel: “So I told them they c0uldn’t read the bible during free reading time.”

Principal Skinner: What? That’s crazy, Edna, that’s not what church/state separation demands. Rod, Todd, of course you can read a bible during free reading time. We still won’t be using it as a science text, mind you.

I infer that, because among the many things I don’t see upthread, not least from Thomas himself, are citations to appellate court decisions (or indeed reference to any sort of legal proceedings at all, bar the vague and unsupported assertion about a court finding for the school in some versions of the Little Leslie Haymon narrative). I believe Thomas is a lawyer, though, and expect he’ll be keen to rack up a fat pro bono Westlaw bill finding the many thousands of decisions on point than I am sure must be out there.

But as for the tale of Young Haymon, it does not give off a strong fragrance of plausibility, does it.

Having found myself agreeing with Thomas to a degree, I note that he reverts, after the first para @25, reassuringly to type.