Orange County school officials hired an explicitly Christian company to provide cafeteria services for at least one school. And nobody grumbled, apparently.

But then journalists at the Orange County High School of the Arts wrote a story about the new cafeteria vendor and included the following factual information:

Alegre Foods identifies itself as “a Christian-based company” on its Web site and displays the Bible verse Matthew 6:25 on its homepage (the words “Matthew 6:25″ also appear on the pepper in Alegre’s logo).

“The purpose to serve God through Alegre resonated clearly.” The Web site states “… in the vision and purpose to become the number one full food service provider for all Christian and Private Schools in Southern California ….”

These two factually correct paragraphs upset an administrator, who put the kabash on the entire newspaper run. A new version, without the offensive paragraphs, will be printed and distributed next week.

The Orange County Register reports that the censorship may have broken California law, which expressly prohibits prior restraint on student newspapers in most instances.

Kudos to the Orange County Register for its coverage of this story. (here and here.)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.