Newdow
Michael Newdow was asked on Tuesday about prayer at public school graduations. He said he opposed having a school sponsor or set aside time for a prayer at any school-organized event. (I understood that to include cases where students led the prayer, as in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, presumably because the school was still endorsing or encouraging prayer by inviting the students to do that, or by putting it on the schedule.)
Newdow then mentioned a case where a student who was valedictorian of his class had sought to talk about and praise Jesus in a valedictory address. The school prohibited and prevented this.
Newdow said the student had been wronged, because it was inappropriate for the school to decide that a religious message on the part of a student was less valuable or less deserving of expression than some other message on the part of a student. If, he argued, the school had decided that whoever was the best or highest-achieving student had thereby earned the right to give a message of his or her choice to the whole graduating class, the school was not entitled to say that a particular viewpoint should not be expressed. If the school would not say that a valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or against the war in Afghanistan, the school should also not be allowed to say that the valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or against religion. To do otherwise would imply that religious speech is less permissible or less protected than other speech, or that religious views are less permissible or less protected or favored than other views. So in a case where a school permits someone to express a personal view, the school shouldn't say that this can't be a religious or anti-religious view.
So Newdow said that religious valedictorians ought to be able to express their religious beliefs in a graduation ceremony if it was the policy of a school that valedictorians ought to be able to express their own views. This was important in order to ensure that the school didn't discriminate against anyone's views.
In discussing this with people, he kept pointing out that valedictorian are routinely permitted to say extremely controversial things which offend many audience members. His favorite example seemed to be the fact that schools permitted valedictorians to oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan (and past or prospective war with Iraq). They would not usually say that this kind of view couldn't be expressed simply because it might offend people. Critics would argue that the audience at a graduation was "captive" and was being forced by the school to listen to a particular message. And Newdow would reply along the lines of "So, are they any less captive when the speaker has an antiwar message, and the school is forcing them to listen to that message?" He considered it essential that, under the first amendment, religious expression is not in any way inferior to non-religious expression, and that people ought to freely and openly express their religious beliefs.
I thought that point of view made sense and provided evidence that Newdow's campaign is a campaign for the first amendment and not against religion. Do Newdow's critics know that he is defending the rights of religious students to speak against the objections of non-religious students who might be offended by religious speech? Do they know that?
(The student whose cause Newdow supported was Jason Niemeyer.)
