High School Traditional Values Club Wins Equal Rights Victory
By Allie Martin
April 3, 2006

(AgapePress) - A conservative student club at one Michigan high school has won a major free-speech victory. After initially resisting the idea, school administrators recently allowed the group to display its flag alongside the rainbow colored flag of the school's Diversity Club.

Two years ago, members of the Traditional Values Club (TVC) at Howell High School in Howell, Michigan, approached the school's administration and asked permission to display their club's flag in the main school hallway. School officials refused the request, however, saying the flag could not be flown because the student group was not officially recognized by the school -- nor could it be recognized until it found a faculty advisor willing to sponsor it.

Steve Crampton is chief counsel with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, which assisted the TVC. He says the Howell High School faculty has been resistant to the student group's existence from its beginning and was initially reluctant to sponsor the club.

"The reason there was no one willing to serve as faculty sponsor, in my opinion, is because the school had already condemned the club, at one point calling them a hate group," Crampton asserts. "What faculty member, knowing that the administration has firmly stated that this is a hate group, wants to be affiliated with it?" the rest