Yes, I know that you're used to hearing about the ACLU stepping in to stop the exercise of religious expression in the public square. They don't like prayers at football games. They're horrified by plaques with the Ten Commandments. They are aghast at lighted crosses (even in people's yards), at teachers who have Bibles on their desk or speakers who dare to mention religious faith in a school assembly.But here's a case where the ACLU is defending the public expression of a high school student's religion!
It involves a North Carolina high school which observes the county's dress code prohibiting fashion statements deemed distracting or disruptive. These include droopy pants, short skirts, "abnormal hair color" and facial piercings.
Thus enters the ACLU to defend 14-year-old Ariana Iacono whose nose piercing is...ahem...part of her religious expression. That's right; it seems that Ariana and her mother "belong to a small religious group called the Church of Body Modification, which sees tattoos, piercings and the like as channels to the divine." And that means, says the ACLU, that the high school is violating the young woman's constitutional rights.
"This is a case about a family's right to send a 14-year-old honor student to public school without her being forced to renounce her family's religious beliefs," wrote lawyers from the ACLU and the Raleigh firm of Ellis & Winters in a brief supporting the lawsuit.
You can dream up the wildest, wackiest of satires to illuminate the post-Christian madness of the West. But when you get up in the morning, you read stories like this -- real life accounts that go farther into the surreal and sinister than you could ever imagine.
Goodnight, Gracie.
