Painful Lessons of Peloza’s Fight Against District

The court order requiring John Peloza to reimburse the Capistrano Unified School District $30,000 for court costs and incidental expenses is not completely fair and just. He and his supporters should also be required to apologize to the students whose classroom time he stole with his religious diatribes and who would have suffered terribly if he had, through a tragic accident, won the $2 million from a lawsuit he had no business filing in the first place.

At a time when education budgets are deep in red ink, his attack on one of our most defensible educational policies to impress his fundamentalist demigod leaders is a slap in the face of every taxpayer who provides the funding for goods and services ultimately not delivered because of waste and graft, as typified by Peloza’s unconscionable legal tactics.

I do not object to his challenge to the state regarding educational policy, which should not necessarily be sacrosanct. Rather, I take issue with the fact that he abused the First Amendment to the Constitution as a crude weapon to assault the right of the people to impose educational standards, and thereby indirectly undermine the validity of objective scientific inquiry and methodology.

RON BENJAMIN

El Toro