I'd like to say thanks to the twenty or thirty people who wrote me advising me about the controversy surrounding Shari Eicher and the WillowFyre Coven here in North Carolina. I'd been following it since the beginning at Wren's Nest, and am mostly pleased with how it turned out.

For those of you who haven't heard about it, the short of it is this: Last month, a teacher named Shari Eicher was suspended with pay from her job as a high school English teacher. The cause of the suspension was the website of the WillowFyre coven, which Eicher runs and on which her name appeared. Three photographs depicting members of WillowFyre practicing skyclad were on the site. Although Eicher was not one of the members depicted, and although appropriate disclaimers were in place, the concern about "community values" was raised. In the end, Shari Eicher did not return to teach at her school. She has instead settled with the school board and will be getting a job at another school, and the school board has given her a good reference and admitted that she in no way attempted to proselytize at the school.

Oh, it could have gone better, I'll admit. I would have liked to see her go back to her original job. But let's be realistic-- how much disruption would have ensued from there? I'm a big supporter of the public schools, and I would hate to see the students caught in the middle of this kind of fight, and Shari Eicher wouldn't have had a better time of it. The religious groups that declared her suspension completely appropriate would not have let the issue drop, and that would have gotten ugly rapidly and often.

The behavior of the religious groups that rallied to support the suspension was interesting enough as it was. One Rev. Russell Baker had these self-contradictory statements to make: "They have the right to believe, preach and practice what they want to. I have the same right and will defend that right, but I think when my religion has to put up a 'If you are under 18, don't come past here' (warning), there's something wrong with my religion.... Nobody that I know of is trying to persecute (the Eichers) because of their religion." (This quote was lifted from the Fayetteville Online Local News. [This link has expired.]) I always love it when the guys on the right decide that something isn't about religion, but can't resist bashing another religion or promoting theirs in the same breath.

What I am pleased about is the fact that this did not go to court. If that had happened, the mainstream national media would have been all over it like flies. Eicher took two of the three photos off the site when the controversy started, and the third (the only one I've seen) is a photo of a male in a circle at a distance. Between the size of the photo and the distance involved, you'd have to use a magnifying glass to be offended. But the media would have had a field day with this, especially since one of the religious groups in question kept copies of the photos and I'm sure they would have been happy to pass these along. We'd have seen the photos on the national news with those black bars over the appropriate areas. It would have been a media circus.

It's quite possible we would have won the legal battle, but overall it would have been a loss for us. The religious right would have made this a smear campaign, and the progress we have made over the last several years would have been threatened. Oh, the damage probably wouldn't have been as severe as the right would be hoping for-- I expect they would have been successful in creating false and exaggerated representations of us, but I doubt they'd have succeeded in raising the outrage they wanted. Even so, this would push us back towards the "fringe" label that we are beginning to shed.

Any situation like this is going to require a certain amount of compromise. I don't know Shari Eicher, and I can't say what was running through her head. Maybe she was choosing the path of least resistance (which she would certainly be entitled to do; my activist opinions aside, it's her life) or maybe she was thinking of the community. Based on what I've read, it would be reasonable to assume it was a combination of both. Either way, I'm grateful to her for her actions... thanks to her, a potentially nasty incident turned out reasonably well, and we came off looking like reasonable people.

© 2000 by Cather "Catalyst" Steincamp