VALEDICTORIAN DEFIES POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

One week ago today, Roy Costner, IV stood up and defied anti-Christian bigots and First Amendment foes when he dared to include prayer as part of his valedictorian speech.  As Megyn points out, it's a sad state of affairs when reciting a prayer at a graduation ceremony must be filed under "profiles in courage."  But that's where we're at these days and so it makes me smile to watch this clip. Well done!

The Christian Post provides additional details:

"I am a strong Christian, and when I heard about our local school board getting attacked by the ACLU and Freedom From Religion Foundation, I realized it was outside groups pressuring our local officials. The complaints came from a Wisconsin organization and the ACLU also tried to make things difficult, even though this was not a local problem and no one from our county had complained about public prayer."

Costner and his friends run a local news website, libertyspeaks.net, so they followed the school district's proceedings closely. "We stay involved in our community, so we all went to the school board meeting when they were deciding on public prayer and we packed it out," he recalls. "It was so crowded that you couldn't move inside, and there was a huge circle of people outside, too. It seemed like everyone in attendance supported prayer in schools, but the school board voted against prayer 3-2 even though not all the members were present for the vote."

The initial complaints from the Freedom From Religion Foundation only demanded that the school board stop prayers and invocations prior to their meetings, but Costner says that some board members were intimidated and reacted by instituting sweeping restrictions. "The school district got so scared and blew things out of proportion that they took prayer out of everything," he lamented. "They did not allow teachers or faculty or staff to participate in the annual 'See You At The Pole' initiative, and they banned prayer and all religious references from athletic events and anything school-related. They took away a lot of rights relating to prayer and free speech."

In addition to ending invocations at all school functions, school officials also decided to replace prayer at high school graduations with a "moment of silence."

Liberty High School's principal, Lori Gwinn, described Roy this way:

"He greets everyone with a positive attitude and always has a smile on his face. He has a passion and an intensity that not many see fully; he has a vision too, and I eagerly anticipate what he will do with that for his future. He dreams big, encourages others, and creates his own path."

Welp, there you have it.  He's clearly a menace to society.  No wonder atheists are angry at him.  A kid like that could cause problems for years to come!

"The valedictorian who so insensitively inflicted Christian prayer on a captive audience at a secular graduation ceremony, is a product of a school district which itself set an unconstitutional example by hosting school board prayer," FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a prepared statement.

In other words, the haters at FFRF will probably sue the district.  Free speech and the First Amendment simply cannot be allowed to thwart the totalitarian impulses of those who view prayer and hate speech as one and the same.  The saddest part is that the misguided folks at FFRF operate under the delusion that they are the good guys in this fight.  Inspired by Roy Costner, I think I'll pray for FFRF that its members and supporters can someday replace the hate in their hearts with something better.