I want to contribute my thoughts to this thread.

Valedictorian is a HUGE Honor to achieve.

I think we can ALL agree to that.

I tried to find some statistics that show the number of students who graduated from UCLA this year but came up empty handed.

I did find a statistic from the year 2007 regarding the total number of ENROLLED students at UCLA.

It was over 25,000 students!

That is a HUGE amount of education going on!

What a HONOR it must be to graduate with the HIGHEST test scores of anyone else!

That type of competition is a GOOD THING.

One of the REWARDS for Graduating with the highest GPA of anyone else in the school is that you are entitled to have a period of time to address all of the losers who came in second place and below....errr I mean graduates. (sarcasm)

Let the girl say WHATEVER the damn hell she FEELS LIKE saying! If she feels like saying that UCLA is a pile of crap educational institute and she is disgraced for having spent money there LET HER!

IT IS HER VICTORY SPEECH! Hell is she chose to quote Mein Kampf and praised Adolf Hitler as a guiding factor of her education who the hell is The University to censor her?

I can think of SOME things that might need to be censored like if she was making threats against other students but as far as her reward she should be FREE being the key word FREE to express her FREEDOM of speech that is NOT threatening the other students.

I am a HUGE supporter of Separating Church and State.

My views are what you would call EXTREME on the subject. Possibly more extreme than anyone else who posted in this entire thread.

But the fact remains this girl is NOT a teacher at the school, she is NOT a member of the faculty or even a staff member. She is a STUDENT!

If she wants her speech to be her saying a prayer for the entire length of her speech time allotted all the more power to her.

She won fair and square.

What a joke.

Really.

I do agree with Annee though...as far fetched as this case is, it truly "doesn't" belong in the speech. I am just surprised that they would actually care this much about it.

Originally posted by Annee
Good!

Her personal religion doesn't belong at a graduation of multi-cultural students of various beliefs.

While it is true that different people have different beliefs, if that would mean that you cannot express your own personal beliefs in front of people that have different beliefs, then that is totally un-American. We should be protecting the rights, freedoms, and liberties of others, whether or not our opinions would agree or disgree with each other, we still have the right to express our beliefs. I mean just merely expressing our own beliefs does not mean that the audience must conform to his/her beliefs, all he is doing is expressing, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. I bet you any money that if the person would be saying something like, "We need to hunt down those Islamic people that committ the heinous acts on 9/11.", that they would have no problem saying that, even though many people would be totally against such a statement like that. I mean how much full of pride have we all become in order to stoop so low as to not let a graduating student to express his feeling that God and/or Jesus contributed alot to his/her life, I mean that is just plain ludacris how we could cringe at such a thing when this is the United States Of America, we should be welcoming other people's opinions for the simple fact that our freedom of expression is one of the greatest freedoms in this nation that many other nations do not have.

Aaron

How disgusting, .... this story is near and dear to my heart, .... it speaks personally to me, as I too, was once ushered off stage for mentioning Jesus at a Boy Scout Rally, the tail end of my speech is as follows:

You know what, I'm not ashamed of god, I love Jesus, Does that make me gay kids ??? Yeah I guess it does, and I dont care, ... I'm gay for god. In fact, If I came across Jesus in a biker bar, and I was a young co-ed in need of some extra cash, .... I would have no problem ......

It was then I was escorted from the building. heathens !