Nice Froggie

A girl and her frog--it sounds like one of those fairy tales that begin on a lily pad and end with the frog transformed by the girl’s kiss into a handsome prince. But Jenifer Graham, a senior at Victor Valley High School, didn’t want to kiss a frog and definitely didn’t want to dissect it. Her moral convictions and respect for animals, not squeamishness, made her refuse and sent her grade in biology class tumbling from an A to a D.

Dissecting a frog seems to us one of those unpleasant rites of passage that are part of everyone’s life--somewhere on the pain scale between driver’s training and the first high-school mixer. But, as the California Legislature recently recognized in allowing students to be excused from such laboratory work if they object on religious or moral grounds, the killing of animals for experimental and educational reasons is truly offensive to a small minority. We would hope that everyone who exercises this right to be excused from lab is as sincere and scrupulous as Jenifer Graham--though the statute, inspired by her dispute with her high school, is clearly vulnerable to abuse.

The legal process may also have been abused here. Jenifer’s lawyers, including the counsel of the Humane Society of the United States, filed their case in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and framed it as a freedom-of-religion matter under the First Amendment, though the constitutional claim was feeble at best: Jenifer could cite no specific religious teaching against dissection, and the Supreme Court has applied First Amendment protections only to religious beliefs, not to individual moral standards. She pursued the case even after the new California law was enacted and the school district offered to apply it retroactively to her case; she could not agree with her teachers about how to make up the lab work.

We believe fervently in the rights of minors--and just as fervently that a dispute over what happens in a biology class doesn’t belong in federal court. This case already has cost the taxpayers of Victorville and environs about $100,000, according to lawyers. If there is a prince in this story, it is U.S. District Judge Manuel Real, who thought that the dispute was becoming absurd and ordered a compromise: Find a frog that has died of natural causes, photograph it and have Jenifer identify the organs from the pictures. That’s a sound solution, and we urge Jenifer to accept it and to move on to subjects that are less fraught with moral vagaries--say, chemistry.