Church and State
stcynic | September 21, 2006A couple more cases where the ADF is almost certainly in the right, reported by Agape Press. One school in Kansas and one in Texas where school officials are not treating Fellowship of Christian Athletes clubs the same as other student clubs, denying them mention in school yearbooks or access to announcement mechanisms that other clubs have. I don't know why so many schools have difficulty with this issue, on either side. It's really pretty simple: you have to treat religious and non-religious student clubs the same, always. If one has access to hand out flyers or use school vehicles or make…
stcynic | September 20, 2006A teacher at a cosmetology school finds out one of her students is gay (not a big shock). She decides to place two religious pamphlets in his smock during instructional time and tell him to read them and discuss it with her later. The student complains to the school about this behavior. The school does an investigation and finds out that she has done the same thing to other students in the past. The school writes her a letter telling her to cease doing such things as it is inappropriate and not germane to her job. The next semester, they decide not to re-hire her and she files a suit claiming…
stcynic | September 20, 2006Here's one where I'll probably be feeding the STACLU crowd, since I don't think they've said anything about this case. The ACLU is filing a suit in Arizona to stop a new state law that provides a tax credit for companies who contribute to a fund for tuition grants for low income students to attend private schools. I strongly disagree with their rationale.
The centerpiece of school-choice advocates' legislative agenda during the 2006 session, the tax break provides companies with a dollar-for-dollar income tax savings for the amount of qualifying donations to groups that provide low-income…
stcynic | September 19, 2006I 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.
stcynic | September 18, 2006Bartholomew has a terrific post at Talk2Action about those who preach the prosperity gospel and the controversy it's creating even in the evangelical community. Last weekend while we were on our way to the Vinx show, Dan and I were talking about religious frauds like that and whether they could or should be covered under conventional anti-fraud laws. He's thinking about writing a law review article on the subject and I'm not aware of any serious scholarship on the question (if anyone here knows of any, please point me to it). The question is fairly obvious: can a minister be charged with…
stcynic | September 15, 2006After stalling earlier this year, proponents of HR 2679, the bill that would eliminate fee shifting in establishment clause cases, have managed to get it out of the judiciary committee and on to the full House. I like this take on it from one of the diarists at DailyKos:
So - to take a real example [ link directly below to "Jews On First" who have the best coverage of the case in question ] - if you're a Jewish family living in Southern Delaware and you complain about the rather blatant and exclusionary promotion of Christianity in the local public school and you and your family are…
stcynic | September 15, 2006Reed Cartwright has a follow up post on the Texas Freedom Network study about elective Bible courses at use in Texas and around the country. He goes into more detail than I did, particularly about creationism and how such Bible courses often endorse the most absurd creationist views. Several of the programs they studied scrape the bottom of the creationist barrell and present Carl Baugh and Kent Hovind, the keystone cops of creationism. I can't believe more suits haven't been filed over this stuff. It's clearly unconstitutional to teach in public schools.
stcynic | September 13, 2006This should surprise no one who has been paying attention. My friends at the Texas Freedom Network are releasing a study today that shows that most of the elective Bible classes in Texas are not taught objectively as history or literature, but are primarily devotional in nature. The study, authored primarily by SMU Biblical studies professor Mark Chancey, looked at the curricula from 25 school districts that offered elective Bible courses and found only 3 of them presented the material in an objective manner. The rest were almost exclusively devotional and taught from a predominately…
stcynic | September 6, 2006As much as I hate to agree with the Alliance Defense Fund, I am forced to once again. They have filed suit in North Carolina over a high school refusing to allow a student to hand out religious literature to his fellow students regarding homosexuality. According to the complaint, the school allowed students to hand out literature promoting the Day of Silence, a yearly event in which students stay silent for the day to protest anti-gay bigotry. But when Benjamin Arthurs tried to hand out literature promoting the Day of Truth, the religious right's answer to the previous event, he was told he…
stcynic | September 5, 2006I thought it might be over the other day when the school board offered to settle and agree not to replace the Jesus picture, but no such luck. The Charleston newspaper reports:
An inscribed mirror has replaced the controversial Jesus portrait on the wall at Bridgeport High School, and civil liberties organizations say it is not acceptable.
Friday afternoon, students associated with the Christian Freedom Alliance donated the mirror to new principal Mark DeFazio.
A brass plate at the bottom reads, "To know the will of God is the highest of all wisdoms. The love of Jesus Christ lives in each of…
stcynic | September 2, 2006Now that the Jesus picture has been stolen, the school board has made a settlement offer to the plaintiffs in the case - drop the lawsuit and we'll agree not to put the picture back up if it's recovered.
The Harrison County school board decided Thursday to ask Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union to dismiss the case it filed in June.
In return, the board promises, "if the reproduction is retrieved, [it] will not put the reproduction back up as it was previously situated," according to a resolution passed 5-0.
I suspect they'll accept that…
stcynic | August 31, 2006The layers of hypocrisy on the part of the religious right in relation to discrimination laws are many and varied. Let's examine them.
Example #1:
In California, they're screaming bloody murder that a bill adding sexual orientation to the state's anti-discrimination laws don't have an exemption for religious groups. But religion is already in the anti-discrimination legislation and they don't want any religious exemptions for that one, even for private universities. See this Agape Press article about a recent decision by Georgetown University (a private Jesuit university) to not allow…
stcynic | August 31, 2006The ridiculous overreaction to California adding sexual orientation to their anti-discrimination laws continues, documented, naturally, by the Worldnutdaily.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has tossed out all sexual moral conduct codes at colleges, private and Christian schools, daycare centers and other facilities throughout his state, if the institutions have any students who get state assistance.
Utter nonsense. All he has done is taken away the state funding. You're still free to discriminate to your heart's content, you just don't get publilc money to do it.
There is no exception…
stcynic | August 30, 2006Agape 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 case anyway. And listen to what their director has to say:
Liberty Counsel, which is based in Orlando, Florida, has offered to represent the Doniphan School District free of charge in the case. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, says it is unfortunate, but there is a difference…
stcynic | August 29, 2006Rob Boston of Americans United has an excellent article on the recent ruling in Iowa against public funding of InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a program of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. The state of Iowa has funded that program to the tune of $1.5 million over the last few years. There's nothing wrong with having prison ministries, of course, but funding them with public tax money is a problem. An even bigger problem is that the state allowed unequal treatment of those who participated in the program, giving them benefits unavailable to others. Most shocking, Boston reports, is…
stcynic | August 19, 2006Glib Fortuna has a post at STACLU about a recent ruling in an Oklahoma ten commandments case that went against the ACLU. And in this case, I'm going to agree with him (not with the ridiculous "oh my god, the ACLU is so evil" rhetorical style with which he and every other STACLU devotee writes, but with the conclusion). This is a case that should never have been brought, and the judge was correct to rule against them. Here are the facts of the case.
On the county courthouse grounds in Haskell County, Oklahoma there are numerous monuments to various things, including monuments to those who died…
stcynic | August 18, 2006The famous Jesus picture that is the subject of a Federal lawsuit in West Virginia has been stolen. Police believe it was stolen by a current or former student at the school, for obvious reasons, and they've got a fingerprint apparently. Whoever did it is an idiot. The theft will only reinforce the "oh my god, they're trying to take Jesus away from us" hysteria from the community and the school board. I honestly don't know how this affects the lawsuit, nor do the lawers involved at this point. Stay tuned, I guess.
stcynic | August 17, 2006The school board in Harrison County, West Virginia has decided to fight a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Americans United over a large portrait of Jesus that hangs in the hallway of the high school there. They had vowed not to use public money to fight the suit, but a fund raising campaign raised over $150,000 for a defense fund, prompting the board to vote to fight rather than settle the case (thus showing that the notion that schools have to capitulate to the ACLU's "intimidation" is false; given the popular public opinion against the ACLU in most such cases, it should not be hard to do…
stcynic | August 16, 2006Thanks to flatlander for sending me a link to this article about Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars and his latest attempt to seize the title of America's looniest state legislator away from Alabama's Gerald Allen. Buttars is back with two new bills. The first would take a stab at "defining the separation of church and state outlined by America's and the state's founding document." The fact that a state legislature's opinion on the meaning of a Federal constitutional provision has no bearing on how that provision is interpreted by Federal courts seems not to matter much to him. His rationale for…
stcynic | August 16, 2006One of the arguments I frequently make when the religious right defends some instance where the government is providing tax funds to support a Christian religious exercise or giving Christians exclusive access to government property is that if you changed the religion being supported to Islam instead of Christianity, most of the arguments they use to defend such displays would quickly become totally unconvincing to them. As long as it's Christianity being supported and endorsed, they're fine with it. Let a judge put up a 4000 pound monument to the Quran in a courthouse, or let a school try…