School Says NO To Sending Letters to Troops

The parent group is engaged in a misguided, constitutionally dubious and passive-aggressive form of shooting the messenger. I don't always like what the police do either, but they are heroes, and they have a job to do, so I am supportive of first responders... including law enforcement. It's no different with these soldiers and marines. They have a job to do, and they knowingly risk their lives on the behalf of American civilians... they are heroes.

I'm not supportive of the transition from liberation to occupation in Iraq, and while I support the military pursuit of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I do have concerns that it too will become a questionable and expensive occupation having little to do with the original operation. But these are POLITICAL issues that have -nothing- to do with the men and women serving on the ground!!! Military service people are the truest form of citizen - they take -true- responsibility for our republic and its future... they offer their very lives for it. To besmirch them wholesale or to make blanket refusals to offer morale boosting support gestures based on politics or partisanship is indecent and reprehensible.

Whether I agree or disagree with their substance, I can sympathize with the political and ideological positions these parents have. They have every right as individual Americans to choose not to participate. And they have every right as parents to prohibit their individual children from participating as well. But to foist their political ideology onto the entirety of the student body by prohibiting this kind of action is an immoral, if not an illegal, abridgment of the other students first amendment rights.

Supporting the individual ground troops who defend our democracy and our sovereignty is not a partisan issue, nor is it a political issue. What these parents are attempting to do use their school to make a passive-aggressive political statement through their children over an apolitical support gesture directed at individual soldiers, and as a direct result, they are also violating the speech rights of the students who want to participate. Whether looked at through the "conservative" lens of troop support, or through the "liberal" lens of civil liberties, from either angle what they are attempting to do is shameful.