New Mississippi bill would strip accreditation from schools that don't fly state's Confederate...
Source: RawStory
New Mississippi bill would strip accreditation from schools that don't fly state's Confederate-themed flag
BRAD REED
27 JAN 2017 AT 10:26 ET
A proposed law in the Mississippi state legislature would strip accreditation from any school in the state that refuses to fly the states flag, which includes the Confederate stars-and-bars in its upper-left-hand corner.
The Mississippi Business Journal [link:http://msbusiness.com/2017/01/bill-make-schools-fly-mississippis-confederate-themed-flag/reports] that the bill, which is working its way through the Mississippi House of Representatives, is a broad initiative to get state schools to comply with all rules and regulations, including one that mandates all K-12 schools fly the state flag.
Schools in majority black neighborhoods including the Jackson school system, which is the second-largest in the state have often flaunted this particular rule because they see the flags Confederate imagery as a symbol of racism, the Business Journal notes.
Bill sponsor Mark Formby (R Picayune) explains that while the flag requirement is included in his bill, getting all schools to fly the flag isnt the legislations primary objective. Rather, he said, its to address complaints he regularly gets from constituents about schools not upholding state laws, including regulations on hiring and purchasing.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/new-mississippi-bill-would-strip-accreditation-from-schools-that-dont-fly-states-confederate-themed-flag/
= new reply since forum marked as read
How about also flying the Nazi flag? They lost a war, too.
Give me a few seconds....
Minersville School District v. Gobitis
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
It was a significant court victory won by Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion forbade them from saluting or pledging to symbols, including symbols of political institutions. However, the Court did not address the effect the compelled salutation and recital ruling had upon their particular religious beliefs, but instead ruled that the state did not have the power to compel speech in that manner for anyone.
Barnette overruled a 1940 decision on the same issue, Minersville School District v. Gobitis (also involving the children of Jehovah's Witnesses), in which the Court stated that the proper recourse for dissent was to try to change the school policy democratically.
However, in overruling Gobitis the Court primarily relied on the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment rather than the Free Exercise Clause.
....
[font size=1]Students pledging to the flag with the Bellamy salute, March 1941.[/font]
Majority opinion
Justice Robert Jackson, who had joined the court only two years earlier, wrote the decision, echoing the free-expression sentiments of Stromberg v. California.
....
The last leg of Frankfurter's Gobitis opinion reasoned that matters like saluting the flag were issues of "school discipline" that are better left to local officials rather than federal judges. Justice Jackson rejected this argument as well:
The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.
The flag they respect
?1434818045
?1434891904traditionally ranks at the bottom of evaluations of schools in the United States. Great to see they're gonna' take steps to "Make Mississippi Schools Great Again!" 
