Hubble, bubble…

I know that most Americans are kind, intelligent and dignified people, and I'm wary of the easy slip from critiquing that nation's shocking governance over the past few years into generalised Yank-bashing, but this really is a shocker: schoolgirl harassed by local education authority for witchcraft - specifically making a teacher sick by cursing her. No, really, now and not in Salem but in Oklahoma - story covered by Pharyngula here and the ACLU statement here.

OK, so Brandi Blackbear is a Wiccan and therefore a typical teenage misfit and wacko, but that's no reason for the school to take her seriously. Furthermore, doesn't suspending someone for successfully hexing the teacher mean that the school board are Wiccan believers too? They've also banned all non-Christian symbols in school, despite the Founding Fathers' (see that apostrophe use?) insistence that the US be founded on non-discriminatory grounds.