A federal appeals court today rejected arguments by Turkish groups that the state violated their First Amendment rights by purging links to pro-Turkish Web sites from a curriculum guide on genocide more than ten years ago.
In a decision written by retired US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said that, as a practical matter, the suit was moot because it was filed after the statute of limitations had expired for such a claim.
However, the court also explicitly rejected the argument that then Education Commissioner David Driscoll's decision to delete most links to pro-Turkish Web sites - after rounds of verbal jousting between Armenian and Turkish groups and Driscoll - had anything to do with the First Amendment.
The Turkish groups argued that the curriculum was equivalent to a library and that Driscoll removed the Turkish links due to political pressure from Armenians. In the past, courts have upheld the rights of protesters demanding the return of library books on First Amendment grounds.
The court disagreed, saying a curriculum is not a library and that the curriculum does not force teachers to use only material listed in it:
[T]he terms of the Guide allow teachers to look beyond it, and its directions to sources with a particular point of view are not meant to declare other positions out of bounds in study or discussion. It also speaks, in other words, in keeping with open enquiry, which is the object of a general library collection.
In fact, the court continued:
The appellants' argument, if adopted, might actually have the effect of foreclosing future opportunities for open enquiry in the classroom. A ruling in their favor might induce school boards to limit the permissible materials for teaching any subject likely to generate heat, simply to foreclose suits under [previous case law] when they modified references or specifications later.
Complete ruling.
