Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
A Pro-Life Club and the Public School
A Pro-Life Club and the Public School
Jun 7, 2025 7:45 AM

I’m not typically a big fan of litigation. But that option needs to be there for some cases that can’t be solved in other ways. It’s a big stick that should only be used when absolutely necessary and only when appropriate.

I’m glad that option was there for Stephanie Hoffmeier of Colonial Forge High School in Stafford, Virginia. When Stephanie applied to register a student club at the school, the administration denied her request, “on the grounds that it was not tied to the school curriculum.”

What was the club proposal? “The Pro-Life Club,” thought to be the region’s “only anti-abortion club in a public high school.” After filing suit in federal court, the educrats at Colonial Forge had to rethink and reexamine their position: “Even some advocates of strict separation of church and state say religious speech is protected under the Constitution and federal law.”

One of the basic rights that is consistently tread over by the public education bureaucracy in the United States is the right to integrate religious faith and intellectual learning, fides quarens intellectum. And even in a case like this, in which faith is brought into an extra-curricular activity, the first and most basic instinct is to squash it.

Thankfully, “School officials, conceding they were wrong, officially recognized the club on Oct. 24, and Hoffmeier dropped the suit.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Gregg: A Book That Changed Reality
Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg is featured in The American Spectator today with an article titled, “The Book That Changed Reality.” The piece lauds Catholic philosopher, journalist and theologian Michael Novak’s groundbreaking 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Called his magnum opus, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism synthesized a moral defense of capitalism with existing cultural and political arguments. Gregg notes this ments on the book’s timely publication and lasting influence: From a 2012 vantage point, it’s easy to...
Acton Commentary: Spiritual Competition and the Zero-Sum Game
In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Spiritual Competition and the Zero-Sum Game,” I examine a plaint against the market economy: that it engenders what Walter Rauschenbusch called “the law of tooth and nail,” petitive ethos that ends only when the opponent is defeated. In the piece, I trace some of the vociferousness of such claims to the idea of economic reality as a fixed or static pie: The moral cogency of the argument petition is enhanced in a framework where the...
Germany’s Lutheran Economics
While the economy of America is influenced by old British economists like Smith and Keynes, Germans are still being influenced by an even older, homegrown economist: Martin Luther. Even today Germany, though religiously diverse and politically secular, defines itself and its mission through the writings and actions of the 16th century reformer, who left a succinct definition of Lutheran society in his treatise “The Freedom of a Christian,” which he summarized in two sentences: “A Christian is a perfectly free...
ResearchLinks – 08.17.12
Article: “Catholicism, Human Rights and the Public Sphere” Christopher McCrudden, International Journal of Public Theology This article suggests that the scope and meaning of human rights, and its relationship to religion, is anything but settled, and that this gives an opportunity to those who support a role for religion in public life to intervene. Such intervention should address four main issues. First, it should ensure that judges engage in attempting to understand religious issues from a cognitively internal viewpoint. Secondly,...
The Vocation of the Politician
This morning the online publication Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life, published my response to a previous article by Thomas Storck on natural law and political engagement. In his article, Storck contents that though the natural law exists as a rationally accessible, universal standard of justice, due to the disordered passions of our fallen condition political engagement on the basis of natural law is all but fruitless. Instead, he mends a renewed emphasis on...
The Complexities of Paul Ryan
Some proponents of limited government understandably yearn to see Mitt Romney’s recently announced running mate, Paul Ryan, as something like the pure intellectual descendent of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Some on the left, meanwhile, will be tempted to portray him as a heartless monster who only wants to enrich the 1 percent. Paul Ryan the politician is plex than either portrait. Far from throwing granny under the bus, his efforts at budget reform are an essential step in saving...
Another Reason We Can’t Afford the Affordable Care Act
In addition to internal logical inconsistencies which raise serious concerns of long term economic sustainability regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), recently analyzed by John MacDhubhain, Robert Pear reports in the New York Times over the weekend how confusion over certain ambiguities in the law (ironically over the meaning of the word “affordable”) would end up hurting some of the people it is precisely designed to help: working class families. Pear writes, The new health care law is known as...
Education and Incentives
I have written on several recent occasions about the role of incentives in education, both for teachers and for students (see here, here, and here). Yesterday, David Burkus, editor of LDRLB, wrote about a recent study by Harvard University economic researchers on the role of incentives in teacher performance. Interestingly, they found that incentives (such as bonus pay) are far more effective if given up front with the caution that they will need to be returned if the teacher’s performance...
The FRC Shooting and the Vocation of a Hero
The key-card was required to get into the building and to operate the elevator, a security precaution added years earlier when protestors chained themselves together in the lobby. But when I forgot my key—and I was always forgetting my key—he plained. He never uttered a sarcastic remark or had a passive-aggressive sigh to remind me of my absent-mindedness. He’d just leave the guard-desk and quietly help me out. I suspect Leo Johnson exhibited the same stoic friendliness today, when a...
Metaphysical Business
Work is at the core of our humanity, says Anthony Esolen, and our ownership of what we produce precedes laws demanding that we give it back to munity” in the abstract. “You didn’t build that!” is probably the mostpreposterousstatement I have ever heard from an American politician. A high bar to clear, no doubt, but let me justify the choice. It puts the effect before the cause. Suppose someone were to say, “If it weren’t for cities, there wouldn’t be...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved