I wrote a few weeks ago about a lawsuit in the Doniphan school district in Missouri. The ACLU filed suit after finding out that the school was holding mandatory school assemblies with teachers leading prayer. The judge in the case has granted an injunction in the case as part of a negotiated settlement. In August, the Liberty Counsel had offered to represent the school in fighting the suit, but as Agape Press reports, even some religious right legal groups recognized that this was a clear cut case and told the school not to fight it.
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Agape Press reports on an ACLU lawsuit against Doniphan Elementary School in Missouri for opening mandatory school assemblies with Christian prayers. This is a really, really easy case where the school is absolutely certain to lose, but Liberty Counsel, a religious right legal group, has taken the…
Not that this will surprise anyone, but even when he's right, he can't seem to avoid misrepresenting what the ACLU says or does. In this post at STACLU, he cites a column by Nat Hentoff (one of my absolute favorite writers) where Hentoff takes the ACLU to task for inconsistency in a pair of cases,…
I forgot to discuss this last week, but the Supreme Court denied cert in the case of Baldwinsville School District v. Peck, a church/state case involving a kindegarten student's right to express a religious viewpoint. The class was given an assignment to draw a poster with their perspective on the…
A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit in Harrison County, WV, over a picture of Jesus hanging in the hallway of a public high school there. But amusingly, both sides are declaring victory. The ADF, which apparently intervened at some point to represent the school board in negotiations, put…
Let's see, even if the class is all Christian there are still problems, which version of the Lord's prayer. Roman Catholic, protestant or... and from Matthew or Luke? I'm just tired of a sectarian Christian point of view forced on Christians and non-christians who don't believe that particular Christianist view.
After spending the British equivalent of K-12 in schools with daily mandatory morning assemblies of the Christian variety I can tell you that they can be quite effective in turning kids away from religion. Mumbled hymns, rote prayers, teenagers stumbling over Bible readings... not exactly inspiring stuff.
I still wonder if there is a concerted effort to wear down the secularists -- and I am definitely one -- by repeated offenses that have to be fought and suits brought in so many different jurisdictions that there will be fewer and fewer lawyers left with time and resources to fight them.
I don't think it's concerted effort to wear down "secularists." Like it or not, these cases occurr in school districts where religion tends to be part of the cultural landscape. We're talking about the "Bible-belt" and rural areas, at that. When I read about cases like Pontatoc, Miss. Indian River, Del., and Doniphan I'm more surprised that there was someone willing to defy the majority than I am by the fact that school officials thought they could get away with flaunting the Constitution. These cases are probably more a grassroots reflection of these communities than they are a game plan concocted in Lynchburg, Virginia or Colorado Springs.