Steven Hall
Alumni of a high school in San Diego, California, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the school’s principal and school board for allegedly breaking the law when voting to remove a saint from the name of the school, the lawsuit states.
The board held the vote after students at the school petitioned to have Saint Junipero Serra’s name removed because of his treatment of Native Americans, according to the lawsuit. Officials at Saint Junipero Serra High School are being accused of erasing the history of both the school and the State of California, according to the press release from the Thomas More Society, a law firm involved in the lawsuit.
The school was named for Fr. Junípero Serra in 1976.
Junípero was a Spanish Catholic missionary that founded missions throughout California to minister to Native Americans, according to Carmel Mission.
The lawsuit states that Junipero Serra High School Principal Erica Renfree encouraged students to join a “lynch mob of erasure and anti-Catholic bigotry.”
“These individuals self-identifying as ‘Preserve Serra High’ object to the school district’s unlawful action of renaming the publicly funded high school without any allowance for input from local resident taxpayers,” the press release states.
‘Preserve Serra High’ wants a Writ of Mandate, which is a court order to reverse the decision to change the name.
Saint Junipero Serra High School didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“This is another example of the ‘cancel culture’ mentality that radical leftist people in education are trying to force on an unwilling American public,” said Charles LiMandri, special counsel at the Thomas More Society. “Father Serra was a great defender of the indigenous people of California, and he deserves our best efforts to defend his legacy.”
The California Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced in June 2020 vandalism of statues of Serra and defended the Catholic saint’s legacy after a petition against a statue said that Serra is “often compared to Hitler.” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called out Democratic House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in June 2020 for not denouncing the destruction of the Serra statue which was in her hometown.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.