The Dallas Morning News’ Kim Breen reviews the Plano school case — the handful of Christian-message candy canes at an elementary school Christmas party that became a debate over religion in public schools that became a lawsuit brought by Plano’s own conservative action legal group, the Liberty Legal Institute, this Tuesday. There’s not much news in the case itself — the Plano School District says it will file a response to the lawsuit shortly, and hopes to avoid litigation by settling out of court — but the school’s immediate reaction is interesting. In what’s likely an attempt to appease the LLI, the district has assigned itself a kind of sensitivity training with Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, who coached the school in developing a religion-neutral policy and empathy for the litigants, claiming, “‘Most people push the envelope because they have to.'” Maybe that sense of besieged helplessness is true of the individual parents in this and other cases, but we’re hard-pressed to extend that benefit of the doubt to groups such as the LLI or the like-minded Alliance Defense Fund, both of which seek out “religious liberty” cases with a fervor and sensibility akin to ambulance chasers. If the personal-injury attorney analogy holds, services like Haynes’s might become an industry in their own right, like medical malpractice training, insurance and defense. And maybe, down the line, the glut of candy-cane cases backing up the courts will become an election issue for some enterprising politician calling for legal reform. But that’s a ways away, and before that must come the increased bureaocracy; in this case, more parental permission slips, which means job creation for office assistants. (What do you expect in this economy?)