Fla. Principal Sued Over Religious, Political Emails
The assistant principal of Bannerman Learning Center in Green Cove Springs, Fla., is suing Clay County School District and the school's principal after he says she violated his constitutional rights by sending him emails containing religious and political messages.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed Nov. 18 in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Florida, school principal Linda Turner used her school email address to “impose her religious views” on assistant principal Patrick Capriola and other school employees.
Capriola and his lawyers hope to receive monetary damages and also injunctive relief against “prayer and other religious proselytizing” from Turner. They also hope to put an end to the “endorsement and promotion of specific political doctrine” which they say also came from Turner.
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The suit describes a number of different messages which Turner supposedly sent to employees, all of which are religiously or politically themed but cover a variety of topics.
One such email encourages employees to pray and have faith in God. Another was sent asking employees to “pray for rain in the name of Jesus for the State of Texas.” Still another conveyed “an explicitly religious and proselytizing sermon-like viewpoint” regarding the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the lawsuit says.
In one of the more political emails included in the complaint, President Barack Obama is referred to as “the jackass in the White House.” In another, a joke is told in which President Obama is referred to as the cousin of those who are in the Taliban.
Most of the messages described in the complaint were sent from Turner's school district email account, while several others were sent from her private email address to district employees.
Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel and director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy, told The Christian Post he thinks it will be difficult for Capriola to get a ruling in his favor.
"In order to have a constitutional violation, you have to trace it to the government and you have to have either a written policy ... or you have to have a custom practice that has been adopted by the school, or adopted by the government, so that you know that it's not just a slip, or a mistake or action by an individual that's isolated,” said Staver.
He says suing Turner as an individual, apart from the school board, would also be difficult because it would have to be proven that she violated a “clearly established precedent.”
"In this particular case I think they're going to have a hard time jumping that hurdle,” he said, adding that it would be difficult for Capriola's lawyers to show there is an “established precedent that sets forth the standard of what kind of emails can be sent by a principal.”
Staver noted that the increased use of digital communications has created a set of new challenges for Christians in the workplace. In many cases the role is reversed, he said, and it is Christians who receive messages they don't want and are unrelated to work. His suggestion for fixing the problem is simple: those in leadership positions should think before they email.
"If you are in a place of authority in a secular work environment, you ought to guard what you say. You ought to say things that are specifically relevant to the work place and the mission of the institution, and it's not a place to use as a vehicle to express personal opinion on either religious or political issues,” he said.
“There's times and there's places where that is appropriate within a workplace, but mass emails is not one of those. And so I think that the kind of respect that we would want to receive is the kind of respect that we ought to give."
The lawsuit against the Clay County School District comes amid another controversy over prayer on the campus of the district's schools which was also spurned on by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, The Florida Times-Union reports.
Neither Turner nor any members of the school board were immediately available for comment.
