Spirit Of The Law

Today I saw an interview on cable news with a teenage boy and his mother. This Texas high school student was suspended when he answered his cell phone in class. His dad was calling him.....from Iraq. Dad is a Master Sargent in the U.S. Army currently serving in Iraq. The high school has a "no cell phone" rule for students, like I am sure most schools do. When it comes to rules, policies, or laws I have argued in the past that they should be evenly applied. I still believe that they should be applied evenly, but not absolutely. In court it is a well established custom to consider the "spirit of the law". In other words, the intention and goal the creator of the law had in mind or was attempting to achieve. It is fairly transparent that the intention of a cell phone policy in a school is to prevent students from needlessly chatting, thus disturbing class. The intention was not to deny a boy from speaking to his father serving in a war zone. I am sure that the Sargent has very limited calling opportunities, and besides dad was responding to a message he received that his son had some problems that he needed to discuss. Put yourself in either role. Think about it, you need your father and he is far away, his life in danger every day. Or the reverse, your son needs you and the only thing that you can do is call at your earliest opportunity. Would you make or accept the call? I would. To make matters worse, nearly half of the students at this Texas high school have at least one parent deployed on active duty. Why was that not taken into consideration as a circumstance special to this particular school? The icing on the cake has to be that the boy's father spoke about this possibility with the school's Assistant Principal before he left for duty. Lately, I have been slamming our "anything goes" society when it comes to social customs and the law, but if we opt for "doing what is right", we will be guided to the right path most of the time.