The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Louisiana has written a firm, solemn 1,744-word letter (with seven footnotes) to a school district because a bus driver warned a kid that homosexuality is a sin one day last month.
The Nov. 18 letter addressed to three East Baton Rouge Parish School System officials stems from an incident when the female bus driver proselytized a male student because she apparently believed he is gay, The Times-Picayune reports.
The female bus driver allegedly informed the Broadmoor High School student, whom the ACLU calls “John Doe,” that he would be going to hell because of his homosexuality.
“The driver then asked John Doe if he went to church or participated in any church-like activity,” the letter propounds. “When John Doe told the driver no, she told him that ‘going to church is how he can avoid sin.’ She proceeded to tell John Doe that homosexuality is a ‘sin’ and that he can go to hell for it.”
She urged the 16-year-old student to repent from his “sinful ways” so that God would forgive him, the student said.
The student responded to the bus driver’s proselytization efforts by telling his sister. The sister told Broadmoor High principal Shalonda Simoneaux, who, the letter states, explained that — like in many school districts — the principal does not oversee the district bus drivers.
The ACLU called Simoneaux’s statement a “non-response” and declared that it shows that “administrative staff does not take seriously complaints of harassment of LGBT students or violations of the Constitution.”
The civil rights group also proceeds with a “constitutional analysis” of the rant of a bus driver.
Keith Bromery, an East Baton Rouge Parish school district spokesman, said local bus drivers have not traditionally received much training about speaking to students in regard to sexual or religious orientation.
“It’s part of our policy but it’s not part of bus driver training,” Bromery told The Times-Picayune.
The bus driver has been disciplined in some undisclosed fashion by the school district and a report of the incident now appears in her file.
The ACLU appears critical of the fact that the religious bus driver still has a means to provide for herself financially.
“The school bus driver continues to drive the bus that both John and Jane Doe must use to attend school every day, subjecting them to the prospect of future harassment,” the ACLU letter laments.
Dave Samuels, a spokesman for the Capital City Alliance, an LGBT advocacy organization in Baton Rouge, suggested that high school bus drivers are respected authority figures just like any other school official.
“There is this level of power that they exert over students, that students don’t feel like they can disregard or back away from,” Samuels claimed, according to The Times-Picayune.
At the conclusion of the lengthy ACLU letter, executive director Marjorie R. Esman called on the school district to “[e]ducate all school staff regarding The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment,” “[e]ducate all school staff regarding Title IX’s prohibition of harassment and discrimination of LGBT students” and establish a host of new bureaucratic procedures for student complaints.
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