Teen suspended from school for ripping out Bible pages
A Texas teen has been suspended from school for ripping apart the Bible during a protest. While speaking out for gay rights in class, 18-year-old Birdville High School senior Isaiah Smith tore pages from the holy book to make a point.
As a result, he was suspended from school for three days.
Smith said the suspension is unfair and that he intends to sue the district to remove the disciplinary action from his record. An attorney from the American Humanist Association has taken on his case for free. “At my high school, some kids like to say that being gay is a sin and that you can’t be gay and Christian,” Smith said. “I wanted to bring my Bible to school and interpret the books of Leviticus and Romans, because they are often used to bully gay people.”
The incident took place on Monday in Smith’s first-period Spanish class. He had his Bible with him, and students began taunting him about how he was going to hell for being gay. The students quoted scripture from Leviticus, and those were the pages that Smith started ripping out in protest of their claims.
According to the BISD Student Code of Conduct, Smith was a disruption to the learning environment, therefore qualifying him for suspension.
A spokesperson for the school said that Smith’s behavior is what got him in trouble, not his destruction of biblical texts.
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