perfidy

Via today's Best of the Web, we find the travails of Bethany Hauf, of Victorville CA, in a story entitled Term paper about 'God' earns student failing grade.

He told me you might as well write about the Easter Bunny. He wanted to censor the word God.

The horror!

Hauf's teacher approved her term paper topic — Religion and its Place within the Government — on one condition: Don't use the word God. Instead of complying with VVCC adjunct instructor Michael Shefchik's condition Hauf wrote a 10-page report for her English 101 class entitled "In God We Trust."

"He said it would offend others in class," Hauf, a 34-year-old mother of four, said. "I didn't realize God was taboo."

So she wrote it anyway. Perhaps she should have dropped English 101 and taken a basic comprehension course instead. Either that or she was spoiling for a fight.

"I don't loose my First Amendment rights when I walk into that college," Hauf said. She is demanding an apology from the teacher and that the paper be re-graded.

Mmmm... o-kaaaay. Which of the words below were foreign to her, I wonder:

Shefchik wrote her back an e-mail approving her topic choice, but at the same time cautioning her to be objective in her reporting. "I have one limiting factor," Shefchik wrote, according to the ACLJ. "No mention of big 'G' gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation."

Being an utterly irreligious fellow, I can't get too jacked up by either Hauf's overt religiosity or her teacher's overt lack thereof - they're each entitled to their kinks. But several things jumped out at me from the story.

First, the author or editor of the story needs to reread the style guide for the Daily Press, assuming they have one. It probably contains a maxim such as "Q: What is hard to lose but can sometimes become loose? A: Your bowels". And if it doesn't have a style guide, it should. Failing an editorial lapse, maybe Hauf actually said "loose", in which case she should be immediately demoted to a remedial spoken English course. And failing that, of course I'm just being too picky, but only because I'm perfect in every way.

Second, even giving credit for the teacher's apparent antipathy toward things religious, Hauf received a valid assignment for an English class, and a challenging one, given her choice of topic. Rather like the lipogram by Ernest Vincent Wright called Gadsby, only a whole lot shorter and easier.

Finally, who is this ACLJ, and why do we need yet another set of harpies to advance the cause of feigned infringement on our basic rights as human beings? Even if we did need such an additional advocacy organization (and I'm not saying we do, by a long shot), at what point in time did the First Amendment become stretched to cover fulfillment of class assignments, as distinct from simple expression of opinion? I don't think one loses one's rights to free speech when entering a classroom, but there's a time and place for expression of opinion, and it's the part of the class where, well, people are discussing opinions. In an expository paper, such as the one she was assigned, opinion has next to nothing to do with, and fulfilling the assignment has everything to do with one's grade. If she'd gotten a bad grade because of her views, I'd understand the umbrage, but she clearly got a bad grade because she explicitly failed to fulfill the assigned task.

And hollering about repression isn't a substitute for just doing the damned assignment.