Just three weeks into the new school year, administrators in one Colorado school have taken rosary beads away from a high school junior – twice!
Surely, he must have been swinging them around, hitting teachers and fellow students in the face, one might mistakenly assume. On the contrary, officials decided to take this action because of fears the strand of Catholic prayer beads are symbols of the student’s gang activity.
As the student’s mother reports, this student wears the beads to help cope with the recent murder of a close family member. This apparently makes no difference to school officials who are facing mounting pressure to battle gang activity, whether real or imagined.
The school’s principal said certain gangs use rosaries as a way to identify other affiliated members. Though I don’t dispute that information, I can’t rationalize taking a genuine spiritual comforter because it had been hijacked by a few thugs somewhere.
Just as one can appreciate a stunning rainbow without being immediately identified as a homosexual, symbols used by certain groups should not be used to stigmatize everyone else for whom they represent something altogether different.
The only reason given for why either set of beads was confiscated was that the strand contained 13 beads, which authorities know is sometimes used by the Surenos to identify one another. Authorities might have known it, but the teen who had his beads taken said he did not. Further research showed only one of the two confiscated strands contained 13 beads; the other had 10.
Officials later commented on the matter, saying they gave the student the option to tuck the beads in his shirt. The student denied it, saying he would have gladly tucked the beads as a compromise.
Several of his classmates spoke out in his defense and, by all accounts, he was a good student. Using common sense, any school administrator could tell whether a student is a stealth gangster wearing his thugged-out rosary or a good kid who lost a family member to violence and clings to the beads because, as he said, “I feel safe when I have them on.”
Sadly, school administrators have many shortcomings and, in many instances, common sense is very high on the list.
B. Christopher Agee founded The Informed Conservative in 2011. Like his Facebook page for engaging, relevant conservative content daily.
Photo credit: miqul (Creative Commons)
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Rosary beads are not meant to be worn as jewelry, but that’s exactly how gang members wear them. This young man may not be a gang member, but it’s obvious he’s wearing the rosary as jewelry, perhaps in memory of a murdered family member and perhaps because of gang affiliation. Whatever his reason for wearing the rosary, he needs to follow the same rules as all the other students. I wonder if his murdered family member was involved in gangs? I’m sure the mother does not want her innocent son hurt by a gang when he is seen wearing the rosary, but that is a very real possibility if he continues to wear them.
Follow all the rules the other kids have to? Those rules are now appearing all across America as NO God, NO Conservative activity of any kind and join in the Praises of Barack Hussein Obama, Mmm, Mmm, Mmmm.
Those are the rules being forced onto kids today. Are you OK with that?
Sure, the Rosary is not a piece of jewelry and sure gang-bangers use them as a backhanded ID. But gang-bangers also use guns to commit crimes and the Husseinites want to take them away from us because of that.
It’s ALL part of their cabal to enslave America. You cannot allow radicals to gain an inch from compromise because they never yield back anything. That is how we are losing America. One compromised inch at a time. All We the People have done is compromise for the past 40 years and we are now backed all the way to the cliff edge.
How much farther do want to back up?
These closet Communists that run the DOE and our local schools won’t compromise with you. Not one inch.
Fine, let your kids wear Rosaries as jewelry. I kept my daughter in Catholic school where she wore uniforms and certainly did not wear the Holy Rosary as jewelry. My grandchildren now attend Catholic schools. We are respectful American Republicans. Unlike the liberals and the ACLU we understand the need for rules that sometimes might seem to infringe on the rights of individuals. That’s why God gave us not only intelligence, but common sense. Too bad there is a shortage of common sense today. I have have taught gang members for many years. They love fooling people like you.
Without rules in school and in the classroom, we have chaos. Please read this column by Dr. Mike Adams of Townhall. He takes a humorous look at students who don’t follow the rules.
http://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2006/04/03/your_mother_was_wrong
teacherintexas Are you stupid or just another democrat? If it were my son I would slap the dog do out some school official.
No, I am not a Democrat. I am a very conservative Republican. And, yes, I have had to deal with parents who believe as you do. I am Catholic and I know how inappropriate it is to wear the Rosary as jewelry as this young man was doing. If you don’t believe me, check with a priest. Wearing the Rosary as jewelry is extremely disrespectful. It’s has only been 2 years since once of my students gunned down another young man shortly after school over gang affiliation. I teach in an urban high school. We cannot prevent students from identifying gang affiliation after school, but we can during the school day. Our goal is to keep all students safe . . . yours included.
Another SICK school !!
These moron liberal “educators” hate religion…..they are afraid of it…scared to death….so they try to destroy religion in others’ lives!!! Hopefully, these are elected people and will be removed by the citizens in the next election. Disgustingly like communism!!!!
I’ve always believed, especially in the world of “trained” educators that common sense is inversely proportional to the amount of educational degrees one has, especially evidenced in the PhD’s.
My experience tells me that even though it is disrespectful for the rosary to be worn as jewelery, it has been worn for many years by hispanics, especially those from Mexico. I wonder if it was the only sign of their faith that could and can be expressed since the persecution of Catholisim in their revolution. Gang members are superstitious in using the rosary and it has no religious meaning. Set me straight if I am wrong.
The real answer to this dilemma is to get this young man out of that school and into one his parents control. Family-Centered Education (misleadingly called “home schooling”) is one outstanding option, but only one of many.
Government-run, tax-funded welfare schools are unsafe for children of any age. They exist because governments find them useful to mold the minds of future citizens into placid, compliant, tax-payers, and nothing more. Any “education” that happens in them is purely window dressing designed to keep the ruse going so more parents will send their children into these indoctrination camps.
M. O’bama, where are the full-time Jobs? (And, while we’re at it, where are the war-zone absentee ballots, Mr. Commander-in-Chief?)