Interesting Exchange with an ACLJ Attorney

I recently joined the religion law listserv, administered by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (archive here). I joined it because, obviously, I'm very fascinated by constitutional law, especially by the jurisprudence that has grown up around the religion clauses of the first amendment, and because the list includes many of the most prominent legal scholars writing on that subject. I don't post much there, I mostly just read the posts because I am not a legal scholar myself. But yesterday I sent a message to the list asking for opinions on the Steven Williams case in Cupertino, California, the case involving the teacher that the media reported as a ban on the Declaration of Independence. I was surprised that there had been no comment at all on the list about it and hoped to learn more about the underlying legal issues.

Anyway, I had said in my initial message that I thought the media coverage, drawing on the press release sent out by the Alliance Defense Fund, was misrepresenting the facts. The ADF sent out a press release with the title "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom", but the truth is that the principal wouldn't let the teacher hand out a bunch of supplemental materials that includes an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence along with lots and lots of other things. That's not honest, in my view, and the media, by and large, ran with it anyway. That drew the response of James Henderson, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the group founded by Pat Robertson as an answer to the ACLU, who doesn't think the ADF press release was dishonest. Here is the passage in his response to me that I find most fascinating:

I also note from the press releases of ADF related to this matter that their organization has not engaged in the sort of grotesque overgeneralization and hyperbole of the "prayer being banned in school" ilk.

Why did this jump out at me? Because this is exactly the sort of rhetoric that his boss, Mr. Robertson, engages in regularly on television. For instance, on January 13, 1995, Robertson said on the 700 Club, "You see what happened in 1962. They took prayer out of the schools. The next year the Supreme Court ordered Bible reading taken from the schools. And then progressing, liberals, most of them atheistic educators, have pushed to remove all religion from the lives of children." Now this certainly is grotesque overgeneralization, as Mr. Henderson admits, because the court did not ban prayer in schools in 1962, it banned government mandated prayer in schools. And likewise, it banned government mandated bible reading in schools. Nor is that the only example of such absurdly inflated rhetoric on that subject from Robertson. In the aftermath of the WTC bombing, he said on his show, "We have a court that has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye and said we're going to legislate you out of the schools. We're going to take your commandments from off the courthouse steps in various states. We're not going to let little children read the commandments of God. We're not going to let the Bible be read, no prayer in our schools." It makes me wonder if Mr. Henderson has ever notified his boss that he is engaging in "grotesque overgeneralization and hyperbole".