Brooks Hamby's graduation speech

For some of you this is old news, but I was just reading a column about this in my local newspaper, which probably isn’t on line, so here’s the Fox News version.

The story, I gather, runs like this… a high school student submits his speech in the form of a PRAYER. The school counselor no doubt tells him (I’m reading between the lines somewhat) that while he is free to briefly mention his religious beliefs, leading the entire assembly in a prayer would not be appropriate. So he rewrites it, this time mentioning censorship and saying something like, “If I were allowed to pray with you, I’d say…” and then just basically gives the first speech again! Once more the school board tells him this is not acceptable. By now it’s the morning of graduation day, and I gather his third draft is more of the same, so the school board just blacks out all religious references and tells him that if he tries anything funny, they’ll turn off his microphone. By this time, I’m wondering if this guy is intelligent enough to be salutatorian!
Anyway, the speech he actually gives tones down the rhetoric, but actually does end with a blessing from “Almighty God”, which, as they probably told him in the beginning, was allowed. The thing that gets me is that the originally column I read this in makes him out to be some kind of hero, valiantly struggling against the forces of “political correctness.” And as you can see the Fox News writer seems to think that he “got away” with something! :wink: