And mind-numbing stupidity, of course.

In what sounds like a rejected plot for a sequel to "The Nightmare Before Christmas," the officials at Willow Hill Elementary School in a Philadelphia suburb told the boy that he could not wear his fake crown of thorns or tell others he was dressed as Jesus. He could tell them he was dressed as a Roman emperor, they suggested helpfully. You know, like Nero and Caligula, who fed Christians to lions. That wouldn't have violated, in their astute view, the school's policy prohibiting "the promotion of religion." Nor, in their brilliantly reasoned estimation, did the children dressed as Satan, or one of his minions. True, it would be hard to tell for sure. The kids wearing horns might have been dressed as Adam Sandler in his bomb "Little Nicky," I suppose, but then again, I'm not certain that I'd know whether a four foot tall kid wearing a twig and paper "crown of thorns" was supposed to be Jesus Christ, either. And since when do Halloween costumes "promote" anything? Was I "promoting" piracy on October 31^st when I was seven? Were all those friends of mine dressed as "hobos" trying to undermine the economic system? Oh no! Was my son's Darth Vader costume promoting the Dark Side of the Force? Horrors!

The boy's mother, who didn't approve of Halloween, put him in a Prince of Peace suit so he could take part in the school's Halloween parade and party; if you didn't wear a costume, you spent a grim day in the computer room. Now the school is being sued on the boy's behalf by a Christian legal group. Normally the Scoreboard dislikes lawsuits over such trivial incidents, but in this instance the suit is richly deserved and might alert other dolts in schools across the country that being an ethics dunce can be costly. School administrators with so little instinct for basic common sense and fairness deserve to be identified, fined and fired. That's what Nero would have done to them, before eviscerating them, of course. Jesus, on the other hand, would forgive them; it's the ethical thing to do.

But the school officials at Willow Hill don't want children to know how Jesus would handle the situation. They made their choice: by their own logic, they wanted to promote the values of Roman emperors, and, of course, Bealzibub. Let's see how they like those values in practice.