The Right Not To Be Offended: The Supreme Court And Religion

John W. Whitehead
Attorney and author
March 22, 2010

Excerpt:
In an attempt to avoid offending anyone, America's public schools have increasingly adopted a zero tolerance attitude towards religious expression. The courts have not helped, allowing schools the discretion to let an offended minority control a cowed majority. Such politically correct thinking has resulted in a host of inane actions, from the Easter Bunny being renamed "Peter Rabbit" to Christmas Concerts being dubbed "Winter" Concerts and some schools even outlaw the colors red and green, saying they're Christmas colors. And now, simply because someone is offended by the title, students cannot play music that has no words and is performed with no religious intent.

What school officials and the courts fail to understand is that by sanitizing the schools of anything remotely related to religion, they are not only silencing an entire segment of the population; they are also contributing to a cultural wasteland bereft of a rich heritage of Western art, music and literature -- all of which, at one time or another, has been greatly influenced by religion. the rest