Reading the Bible in Reading Time

by Harry on April 22, 2009

A story that circulates in some evangelical and homeschooling circles concerns a boy who was told, in a public elementary school, that he could not read the Bible during his free reading time. One version of the story has him being sent home. In some versions of the story (that have been told to me directly) the courts find in favour of the school. I’ve heard the story for quite a while, and assumed there was a grain of truth in it, but have never done the work to find the details (I assumed that the “sent home” version was embellishment, and that the “court finding for the school” bit was… well, at best remarkably ignorant of the law). But now I look for the story, I can’t find any version in what I regard as a reliable news source. Here is the Thomas More Law Center’s version of its own work, which must be true, surely. But google the boy’s name and you get lots of blog posts, but nothing from, for example, the Chicago Tribune, or AP, or.. (There’s the Catholic News Agency, which I might regard as reliable if it weren;t the only source). More mysteriously I’ve heard versions of the story for at least a decade, whereas this version seems very recent. I’m not the best googler or wikipedia user, but am surprised I haven’t found more. Do any readers know the true story?

{ 46 comments }

1

hardindr 04.22.09 at 2:56 pm

I’ll send an email to AU and see what they know about it.

2

tom bach 04.22.09 at 2:59 pm

When I did this search haymon site:http://www.dist159.com/ I found this document http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:s3T2kZipKE4J:www.dist159.com/PDF%2520docs/fall%252007%2520ISAT%2520newsletter.pdf+haymon+site:http://www.dist159.com/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us which mentions a leslie c haymon doing well in the 4th grade.
Thomas Moore has Leslie as the dad. It seems to be a case of turtles all the way doen.

3

joel hanes 04.22.09 at 3:00 pm

nothing on snopes looks like a match, but I’d assume it’s an urban legend

4

tom bach 04.22.09 at 3:01 pm

or down.

5

nolo 04.22.09 at 3:26 pm

Judging from the blogpost I’m going to link below, apparently there was a contemporaneous story of some sort in a Philadelphia paper (of all things). The link to the paper’s website is dead, apparently because the paper doesn’t archive back to 2007, but there is quoted text in the blogpost. I must say, however, that the quoted text looks a lot like it was probably from a Thomas More press release . . .

http://jacklewis.net/weblog/archives/2007/07/why_i_homeschoo_4.php

6

tom s. 04.22.09 at 3:41 pm

I wish “time-honored family values” included spelling and punctuation.
“the Thomas More Law Center, immediately sent school officials a demand letter on the Haymon’s behalves”
“both the principle and Haymon’s regular teacher said …”
What is the world coming to?

7

dr ngo 04.22.09 at 3:44 pm

More dubiousness in the source (at least the transmitting source “nolo” linked to):

The school was Michigan Elementary School District No. 159, located right outside Chicago, Ill.

Say what? I used to drive from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Chicago. You have to go through another state – Indiana – to get there!

Can you imagine someone daft enough to think that reading the Bible during free reading time is unconstitutional? Why would they allow someone like that to be a principal or teacher, let alone substitute?

I think “let alone” does not mean what you think it means. Unless you seriously believe that substitute teachers – lowest of the low in institutional esteem – should be held to higher standards than principals or teachers.

Sheesh.

Posted by Danny Carlton at July 26, 2007 6:52 AM

Provider of the quotes above. How good a source? You decide.

8

Ginger Yellow 04.22.09 at 3:47 pm

“Here is the Thomas More Law Center’s version of its own work, which must be true, surely”

Given their track record, that’s quite an assumption. Have you seen their suit about the DHS report on right wing extremism? It’s hilariously inept and frivolous.

9

nashe 04.22.09 at 4:08 pm

I worked as a temp copy-editor for Philadelphia’s Catholic newspaper. If my experience there is any indication, you CANNOT regard Catholic news organizations as reliable sources of information. The managing editor actually told me in no uncertain terms when I protested the inclusion of certain details on a piece on Terry Schiavo that the paper’s job was to fight the good fight against all that horrible secular news out there. Reliable sourcing was not high on her agenda.

10

Uncle Kvetch 04.22.09 at 4:37 pm

This type of thing seems to be quite popular at the moment.

11

Thomas 04.22.09 at 4:45 pm

I imagine that there are at least a handful of true cases of this. Why would we expect constitutional law and real-world school practice to line up perfectly? How many public school teachers are there? More than 100,000? That’s a lot of people who have to get this question right every day.

I’ve googled a little bit and found references to an old case involving Joshua Burton. See
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-AmRel&month=9509&week=c&msg=bRANdfgzTn1ntvllUklrTQ&user=&pw=

Is there some reason to think that the Thomas More Law Center wasn’t involved in the Haymon case? Not any I can see. (What actually happened at school is a different question.)

12

bianca steele 04.22.09 at 4:57 pm

I was suspicious, because Philadelphia’s evening paper, the Bulletin, has been defunct for a couple of decades, but there’s the web site right there.

Though, if you want my two cents, I’m suspicious about these kinds of stories in general. Someone once told me that women were moving far from home for what they thought was a better life with a better job, and it turned out the so-called job was supplied by Russian organized crime and was in prostitution, and that this was happening in the mid-Atlantic United States: people who like to gossip seem to mangle or conflate certain kinds of stories in predictable ways.

13

wesuilmo 04.22.09 at 4:58 pm

District 159 is right outside of Chicago but it is Mokena not Michigan. Probably another case of overly aggressive use of a spell checker.

14

Dirty Davey 04.22.09 at 5:04 pm

Here’s the thing–assuming the case is true–it’s a case where crazed right-wing prophecies become self-fullfilling.

To the extent that teachers and adminstrators HAVE misunderstood the ruling, and have made mistakes like asking a student not to read the Bible, or reprimanding a student who says grace in the lunchroom, this is happening NOT because of the actions of liberals but rather because the conservatives have MISREPRESENTED rulings on “prayer in schools”. Conservative propaganda scares the teachers and administrators into believing that the court rulings apply in cases where they clearly do not, and so out of fear for their job security the teachers and administrators end up enforcing “restrictions” that are neither constitutionally mandated nor appropriate.

So the conservatives yell that “the courts want us to punish Johnny for saying grace in the cafeteria”, and the teacher hears them yelling and assumes that they must be telling the truth, and that the teacher has an obligation to reprimand a student who bows his or her head over the lunch tray.

15

Keith 04.22.09 at 5:21 pm

The story absolutely reeks of urban legend. It’s nothing but layers of unsourced allegations (a dozen academics in the age of the Internet can’t find 1 reliable citation), contradictory details (was the kid sent home or just told to put the Bible away? was there a law suit or not?), anecdotal evidence (“this one time, at band camp…”), hearsay (my cousin’s kid’s school mate’s brother knew a girl who said she had a friend who once had this happen to her niece) , hyperbole (sent home from school for reading) and shifting time frames (the story has been passed down for at least a decade). And then there’s the audience bias: religious home school parents telling each other emotionally gratifying bogey man tales (were they around a campfire?) about the evils of secular schooling and how the oppress the righteous few who just want to read the Bible. I call Bullshit.

16

Colin Danby 04.22.09 at 5:36 pm

17

Witt 04.22.09 at 6:09 pm

Philadelphia’s evening paper, the Bulletin, has been defunct for a couple of decades, but there’s the website right there

Right, the Bulletin went out of business in I think 1982. However, a few years ago, an investor bought the rights to the name and started publishing a new paper under the old name.

The current paper is given away for free and has a profoundly conservative bent — e.g. recent front page above-the-fold article on Obama’s citizenship.

18

CJColucci 04.22.09 at 6:53 pm

Dirty Davey makes an exellent point. I would add only that the likelihood that local school boards hire lawyers who actually know this stuff and can give correct advice is small.

19

Sebastian 04.22.09 at 8:09 pm

“Can you imagine someone daft enough to think that reading the Bible during free reading time is unconstitutional? Why would they allow someone like that to be a principal or teacher, let alone substitute?”

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the main story/rumor/potential legend, but I do know that this is a horrible way of analyzing it.

There was a vice principal who thought that the zero tolerance rules on drugs made it ok to strip search a girl over contraband Advil. And the school board took it to the Supreme Court. cite

20

Sebastian 04.22.09 at 8:32 pm

Don’t know where to put it, but this serves as some kind of evidence regarding the recent post here on the likelyhood of London cops and their use of terrorism rules on photographs in inappropriate ways.

21

rea 04.22.09 at 8:45 pm

Edward L. White III is, according to my directory of the Michigan Bar, a real attorney.

I’m inclined to suspect tht this particular incident happened, and I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case that students are entitled to read the Bible in reading class, as opposed to, say, at lunch. It would depend on what religious-neutral limitations the school had on what could be read in the class.

22

bianca steele 04.22.09 at 9:02 pm

Witt,
I figured something like that was the case, and I think I vaguely remember something to that effect now. Obviously the current publishers are trying to cash in on the nostalgia and authority value of the earlier, serious publication. They are even using the same logo. From looking at the web site alone, there isn’t anything that obviously marks the publication as anything less than a serious daily newspaper (for example, their attention to the financial troubles of the Inquirer, many years ago the Bulletin’s big rival, up near the top).

I feel better, though, now — I feared my having initially believed, incorrectly yet ultimately correctly, that the Bulletin no longer existed, would impugn my credibility.

23

bianca steele 04.22.09 at 9:08 pm

It’s possible to read any one of these stories “charitably” and thus come up with an explanation for what happens that has everybody acting more or less “reasonably” from their own point of view. What’s not possible is for all of these charitable readings to describe the same event. Therefore, someone is not reporting accurately. The most likely explanation is a willingness to make their reporting serve an agenda whether or not the facts can be made to support their agenda; each reported version, then, supports a different agenda. There is no reason to think that in this case even a single one of the reported facts is true.

24

Colin Danby 04.22.09 at 9:16 pm

My public-school 9th-grade English teacher assigned Luke’s Gospel as literature. There seems to be widespread misapprehension that religious texts are banned from secular education. If that is the case anywhere in the US it shouldn’t be difficult to document via citations to law or policy. Otherwise you have to suspect the deliberate cultivation of resentment.

25

Thomas 04.23.09 at 1:45 am

I suppose I agree with Bianca, and don’t believe that all of these stories describe the same event. The most likely explanation for the differences in the stories is that the stories actually involve different events. Such as the case of Joshua Burton, which I mentioned above. He testified before Congress about his case. And the case of Bryce Fisher in South Bend, Indiana. Bryce and his family were represented by the Becket Fund, a prominent public interest law firm which litigates religious liberty cases.

Colin, why would it be surprising that some people misapprehend the law, and that others refuse to follow it? Do you ordinarily blame the victims of state wrongdoing? If so, you aren’t the only one. Dirty Davey is right there with you.

Quite a group of commenters here. This never happens, and to the extent it does it’s the fault of the victims. A mixture of ignorance and bigotry, all the way down.

26

Walt 04.23.09 at 2:59 am

A mixture of ignorance and bigotry, all the way down.

Well, you would know, Thomas.

27

Robert Hanks 04.23.09 at 8:45 am

Googling Joshua Burton, I can’t come up with a single primary source: just a few Christianist sites expressing shock. However, Thomas is quite right that Joshua testified before Congress – specifically, a Congressional Subcommittee on the Constitution at Tampa on 23 June 1995, part of five days of hearings on “Religious Liberty and the Bill of Rights”. Reference: the Library of Congress website, http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?sel=DOC&&item=&r_n=hr543.105&&&sid=cp105wMGKl&&refer=&&&db_id=cp105&&hd_count=&.

Unfortunately, the Library of Congress doesn’t give any details of his case. There is a plausible-looking transcript of his father’s testimony at http://www.skepticfiles.org/american/burtonts.htm. Without some idea of the school’s version of events, this doesn’t have much evidential value; but I’m prepared to accept that something happened here – that this particular story is not purely an urban myth. But I don’t accept Thomas’s wider assertion that “The most likely explanation for the differences in the stories is that the stories actually involve different events”. The lack of primary sources, and the way they echo time-worn tropes about pious children defying their blasphemous elders, shriek “urban myth” to me.

And how does Thomas manage to conclude that what went on in any case was “state wrongdoing”, as opposed to individual teachers getting it wrong? Browsing that Library of Congress page (all about a proposed “Religious Freedom Amendment” to the US Constitution – which never got passed, thank God) offers some perspective: stories of tearful Christian children are matched by tales of other kids who resist the call to prayer and are branded satanists or “dirty Jews”. Shall we put that down as “church wrongdoing”?

28

Ginger Yellow 04.23.09 at 9:56 am

Um, there is nothing unconstitutional about teaching the Bible (or other religious texts) as literature. The problem is a) that some Christians (or their parents) object to that approach, and b) it leaves the school vulnerable if a teacher steps over the line in either direction. So most public schools don’t teach it either as religion or as literature. It’s much the same reason you don’t often get comparative religion classes in US schools – people flip out when you start talking about creation “myths” and things like that.

29

kid bitzer 04.23.09 at 10:43 am

thomas is surely right; after all, the most likely explanation for the various forms of the blood libel is simply that the jews ate christian children quite frequently.

with all that throat-cutting and blood-draining going on all over europe, it’s no wonder that names and details get confused.

30

Matt McIrvin 04.23.09 at 12:19 pm

I dimly recall that at some point in Bill Clinton’s first term, there was a spate of rumors of this variety going around, and occasional incidents probably sparked by the mechanism Dirty Davey described above; and the Clinton administration actually put out a memo describing in some detail what they felt the real legal situation was concerning religious expression in public schools, a memo that was basically an extended expression of common sense. Secularists and mainstream religious leaders alike praised the memo, the furor died down for a while, and a few years later everyone had forgotten it ever existed.

31

Matt McIrvin 04.23.09 at 12:21 pm

Correction: it was actually in July 1995, early in Clinton’s second term.

32

Mrs Tilton 04.23.09 at 12:49 pm

I actually agree with Thomas on one point. Given the size of the United States population and the decidedly hazy notion many citizens (including many school officials) have of what is and is not constitutionally kosher, it would be almost surprising if something roughly like what is described hadn’t happened some place, some time. If so, though, then I’d infer the problem was dealt with (as most problems are) at a low and in-house level. Like this, perhaps:

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.

33

mossy 04.23.09 at 1:07 pm

Very interesting (and amusing) discussion. Thanks in particular for the link the Clinton memo, which I’d never seen.

34

Thomas 04.23.09 at 1:40 pm

Robert, the problem may be that you’re googling for things published in 1995. when a teacher is employed by the state and acts on behalf of the state, the teacher is the state’s agent, and the teacher’s wrongdoing is the state’s. Just as when a police officer abuses a criminal suspect it is state wrongdoing. This isn’t complicated in the normal circumstance–is it the presence of a bible that confuses the issue? As for the abuses you mention: in some cases those appear also to be cases of state wrongdoing–when, for example, a Mississippi public school had a prayer over the intercom, which some students objected to, the school was wrong to have that prayer. (Are the skeptics here going to insist on the same level of evidence for that claim? And do we blame the victims in that case, inventing some mechanism to justify ignoring their claims?)

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.

35

Thomas 04.23.09 at 1:51 pm

Mrs Tilton–Yes, I expect most of these issues are resolved precisely as you say. And some aren’t–given a large enough group, I’m sure it’s not surprising that we’ll find principals who don’t know the law, and school boards, and, in some cases, even lawyers.

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.

36

harry b 04.23.09 at 1:58 pm

Well, I confess that I always assumed some version of this story was true, partly for the reasons given by Thomas and Mrs Tilton, and partly because I know enough schoolteachers who have deep contempt for Christianity that an occasional slip like this seems entirely plausible to me, and enough who don’t have much idea of what the law is that I believe some could genuinely believe that the law disallows reading bible in school. (I have talked to teachers who thought it was illegal for my wife to teach “The Bible as Literature” in a public school; and I’ll add that although legal and brilliantly taught, the class drew exactly the complaint that GY anticipates — a student who thinks the Bible is literally the word of God and whose parents object to him learning any scholarship around it).

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.

37

Mrs Tilton 04.23.09 at 2:18 pm

Thomas @34,

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.

38

bianca steele 04.23.09 at 3:55 pm

Thomas,
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean that the stories described different events, which is what you interpreted me to be saying. I meant that way the stories differ from one another makes it unlikely that they are reasonable differences of opinion about the same event, which I think is very characteristic of rumors spread by multiple layers of hearsay.

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.

39

Thomas 04.23.09 at 7:41 pm

Harry, I’m afraid I don’t understand what relevance press reports have. I’ve provided a link to a case reported in the Washington Post. (I hope you can see it–I see that it says my comment 34 is awaiting moderation.) As it happens, for various reasons I’m not sure that’s the strongest case, but because it was reported, apparently it’s something you’d give more credence to than, say, the reports of participants in various disputes resolved without litigation.

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?

40

harry b 04.23.09 at 8:13 pm

Oh, I’m just going with local experience which is that any noteworthy misstep of any teacher (and many un-noteworthy ones) get picked up and done to death, regardless of whether any lawsuit is filed or legal representation taken, that’s all. I’d have expected that something that gets to a Congressional hearing would have been reported in the local press. I’ll check the moderation queue for your comment and link (sorry about that, you probably used some problematic word or phrase like…well, I won’t say what or I’ll get held up too).

41

Harry 04.23.09 at 8:24 pm

Thanks for the WP link. I suspect the filter didn’t like several links in a row all to the same website, suspecting spam (well, not actually suspecting it, but doing whatever inanimate filters do).

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.

42

Thomas 04.23.09 at 9:38 pm

Harry– thanks for clearing the comment. Hadn’t struck me that there would be a problem, but I’ll keep the link issue in mind in the future.

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.

43

bianca steele 04.23.09 at 9:46 pm

Thomas,
Sorry, I see I’ve over-compressed some things in an attempt at brevity. A couple of clarifications:
1) Yes, I do think it’s possible that the boy’s father was lying. Are you saying the (civil) law takes the position that participants in a court case are engaged in the selfless pursuit of the truth? That he was lying is not the only explanation for why he testified that he knew what the other children were thinking. It’s also possible he honestly believed he knew what the other children were thinking — which he could not possibly have known (though perhaps in some cultures he would believe he could?). I don’t know how the law sees that, but I personally question the understanding of someone who truly believes he can see into the hearts of other people. I don’t think I said that was a “moral” failing, but if that part of the story came from his own head, rather than the facts, it isn’t surprising if it fits a pattern. (Which does not mean the rest of the story might not still be true.)
2) Obviously, somebody is either lying or sloppy here. The boy’s father testified that the boy was reading aloud in the playground and that two students heard him speaking and objected. The other statement says the boy was reading silently in class. (Is it not considered “lying” if a settlement requires the parties to a dispute to publicly support a false version of the facts, which I suppose may have happened here? Is it not considered “lying” if a press outlet settles upon its own false versions for what it feels to be virtuous reasons?)
3) It’s interesting that the “Bulletin” story also says the boy involved got into trouble after a student objected — but in this case, the objection sounds kind of different. Here the child objecting is a busybody who shouldn’t have been bothering about what other kids read, where in the other case they did or said something or other in response to actual speech. And in the “Bulletin” story, the nature of “reading time” is explicitly defined as “silent reading time.”
4) The Thomas More story doesn’t give those details. Were they added by the writer for the Bulletin, or his source, in order to preempt readers’ objections? That’s what I mean by “embellishments.” These are the kinds of embellishments you hear in versions of these kinds of stories that are spread by gossip. (The TM version of the story, on the contrary, is bloodless and unobjectionable, and could be met with sympathy by members of any faith.)
5) As a lawyer, you probably are told stories all the time as part of your work and you’ve probably come to think of them a certain way. Most likely they come across differently when they are told to you over coffee, in all their lurid and implausible detail, for no apparent reason that you can discern, except to emphasize how bad “they” are (whoever they may be) and how careful you ought to be.

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.

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watson aname 04.23.09 at 10:29 pm

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.

Desperate need Thomas? Are we reading the same comments?

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Thomas 04.23.09 at 11:24 pm

bianca–I agree that he could be lying. He could also be telling the truth. There’s nothing about his story that makes it fall into one of those categories, except the truth or falsity of it. I don’t think that drawing inferences about other people’s motivations is inherently dishonest, though on your view it looks like it must always be. The law must make allowances for that sort of thing, since juries are required to do what the father in this case did.

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.

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Witt 04.24.09 at 2:17 am

But, it is incredible to me that an incident like this could have failed to trigger direct reports in actual newspapers.

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.)

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