‘Honk for Peace’ Case Tests Limits on Free Speech

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/14/1181/

‘Honk for Peace’ Case Tests Limits on Free Speech
by Bob Egelko

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - When one of Deborah Mayer’s elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, “I honk for peace.”

Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn’t have any.

As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher’s speech is “the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary.” The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.

The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney’s office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.

But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.

more...

[prole_for_peace]

1. but she was answering a question from a student.

i guess she should have just said "none ya" and walked off.

[babylonsister]

2. This whole case seems criminal to me, and the teacher's not the

criminal imo.