Guest Post by Morbo
A Virginia-based Religious Right legal outfit called the Rutherford Institute has sued the public school system in Prince George’s County, Md., claiming that a vice principal there ordered a 13-year-old girl to stop reading the Bible during her free time.
I am little suspicious of this claim for a few reasons. For starters, Religious Right groups and their allies have a habit of telling stories like this only to have them later exposed as specious. For years, Newt Gingrich roamed the country telling a story about a boy in a St. Louis public school who in 1994 was supposedly disciplined for praying over his lunch. Enterprising reporters contacted the school, and officials there said the whole story was a crock.
More recently, a TV-preacher-founded group called the Alliance Defense Fund late in 2004 sued a California school on behalf of a teacher who claimed he had been ordered to stop teaching about the Declaration of Independence because of its reference to “the Creator.” A group of parents at Stevens Creek Elementary in Cupertino said the teacher’s claims were nonsense. The lawsuit made a big splash in the media and was a cause celebre among the far right. The Fox News Channel covered it for a week. Few in the media bothered to follow up when the case was quietly dropped months later.
Secondly, I am familiar with the Prince George’s County school system, since I live in the adjacent county. Frankly, this school system usually has the opposite problem — inappropriate forms of religion in school. Over the years, I’ve heard stories of graduation ceremonies in this county that took on the flavor of Christian church services. I find it hard to believe that this system would promulgate an anti-religious policy like this.
Finally, Rutherford has a history of working to merge church and school. Although the group’s founder, lawyer John W. Whitehead, has had some interesting things to say about the erosion of our civil liberties under the Bush regime, his views on church and state come straight out of the Middle Ages. Most recently, the Institute offered to defend a school district in southern Delaware that stands accused of promoting Christian practices for years.
But let’s assume for a minute the Rutherford Institute has the facts right this time. If that is so, the school is clearly in the wrong because students have the right to read the Bible or any other religious text during free time.
Perhaps the school official overreacted or is simply ignorant of the law. There is a way to deal with that: apologize to the child and inform the vice principal and others who work in the system about what the law says. In fact, the school system already has a policy specifically stating that students have the right to read religious literature and engage in voluntary, non-disruptive prayer. Perhaps employees need to be reminded of it.
So why the need for a federal lawsuit? Did The Rutherford Institute even try to discuss the matter with the school officials before rushing into court? The Prince George’s system is a large, suburban district located near Washington, D.C. It undoubtedly has a team of lawyers who advise it on numerous matters. Any one of them would have been able to set the superintendent straight.
I don’t know what happened in the county schools that day, but I suspect I know what happened in the offices of the Rutherford Institute: a group that doesn’t much like public schools saw an opportunity to grab some quick headlines and went for it. Since the school system has a policy of not commenting on pending litigation, only one side is being heard, and the right-wing is up in arms. My guess is that the obligatory “can-you-believe-those-awful-god-hating-public-schools” fund-raising letter is soon to follow.
It’s all in a day’s work for the Religious Right’s legal eagles.