Conservatives in Georgia are outraged that a speaker’s Constitution Day presentation was canceled at a local high school after complaints from Democrats.
The reason behind the complaints is that Mark Fritz, the man who volunteered to do the presentation to the students during the week of Sept. 17, is a member of the local tea party.
Pickens County High Principal Eddie McDonald eventually agreed to stop Fritz from speaking after being bombarded with emails and phone calls, he said.
McDonald told the Pickens County Progress that he had no problem with the presentation at first because Fritz pledged not to mention the tea party movement or speak from a partisan perspective. He also previewed an outline of his address with school officials.
“We were okay with that,” McDonald said, “but there were a group of people that got word of it, and I was bombarded with calls and emails.”
An outline of Fritz’s presentation obtained by The Daily Caller shows no mention of the tea party movement.
Federal law requires schools that receive federal money to have such a program during the week of Constitution Day.
David Robinson, the leader of the Democratic Party of Pickens County, told the newspaper, “Our main problem with him was that he had no qualifications to speak other than personal opinions he had.”
Eric Gray, the communications director for the Democratic Party of Georgia, told the superintendent of the school system in an email that Democrats are “concerned about the partisan nature of this event.”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that presenting an ‘expert’ on the Constitution with no formal schooling in the subject other than his ties to a political party is problematic,” Gray said.
One outraged conservative Georgian who has been keeping the issue alive is Martha Zoller, a Republican congressional candidate who has been discussing the conflict on her radio show.
“Can’t citizens be experts on the constitution?” Zoller said. “Isn’t that what we’re called to do?”
