4 people face fines and jail time for cheering at high school graduation
Four people in Mississippi face possible fines and jail time over the apparently grievous crime of cheering at a high school graduation after being asked to hold their applause until the end of the ceremony. The offending cheers ranged from a simple call of the graduate's name to, "You did it, baby!"
After having the cheerers removed from their family member's ceremony, the school's superintendent, Jay Foster, pressed charges of misdemeanor disturbance of the peace. "They yelled out and they excessively celebrated during the calling of names," Foster says, defending his decision. "When you make a conscious decision to disrupt that for that individual, what is too harsh?"
Henry Walker, one of the four people charged for cheering on his daughter, disagreed: "The fact that I might have to bond out of jail, pay court costs, or a $500 fine for expressing my love, it’s ridiculous, man."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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