Third Graders Told To Bring Their Favorite Book to School — Unless It's the Bible
Yet another public school teacher has banned a little girl from bringing her Bible to school – this time because other students might “ask questions.” Treating the Bible like contraband in school is a clear violation of the Constitution, and we quickly took action to defend the rights of this nine-year-old girl.
For decades, the ACLJ has been advocating for the rights of students to express and share their faith in public schools. Over 30 years ago, in Westside Community Board of Education v. Mergens, ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow vindicated the right of Bridget Mergens and other students to start a Christian club on a school campus. (You can listen to Jay’s argument before the Supreme Court here.)
The school district had denied Bridget’s request because it claimed having a faculty sponsor for the club would violate the Establishment Clause. The Court wrote:
[T]here is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect. We think that secondary school students are mature enough and are likely to understand that a school does not endorse or support student speech that it merely permits on a nondiscriminatory basis. (Emphasis added.)
The Mergens decision has been cited by the federal courts time and again in support of religious expression by students and others.
Unfortunately, even after all these years, some school officials have not heard the message.
Last month, a third-grade teacher told the class that the next day the students could bring their favorite book to school. Our client, a nine-year-old girl, was excited. She told her teacher that she would bring The Ultimate Bible for Girls as her favorite book.
The teacher said that the Bible would be inappropriate. Why? Because the other students “would ask questions.”
Astonishing. A student’s constitutional right to religious expression is firmly established. Not only that, encouraging students to ask questions, discuss issues, and share their opinions is a core feature of any sound educational system. In fact, the school district’s student-parent handbook, in this case, rightly and explicitly encourages students “to study, consider and discuss all sides of controversial issues.”
We wrote a letter to the superintendent of schools explaining that the right of students to read the Bible, at a time when other students are permitted to read from their choice of non-religious materials, is supported by regulations of the U.S. Department of Education and ample Supreme Court case law:
In Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches School District (another case successfully argued by Jay), the Court held that “the government violates the First Amendment when it denies access to a speaker solely to suppress the point of view he espouses on an otherwise includible subject.”
In Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., the Court wrote that “in the realm of private speech or expression, government regulation may not favor one speaker over another.”
In Good News Club v. Milford Central School District, the Court “reaffirm[ed] [its] holdings in Lamb’s Chapel and Rosenberger that speech discussing otherwise permissible subjects cannot be excluded from a limited public forum on the ground that the subject is discussed from a religious viewpoint.”
Just last year, the Supreme Court used these and other religious liberty cases to further strengthen the principle that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from singling out, censoring, or otherwise burdening the speech of private parties solely because that speech is religious in nature.
In Shurtleff v. City of Boston, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the city of Boston’s practice and policy of flying various political and community flags outside city hall but refusing to fly the Christian flag “discriminated based on religious viewpoint and violated the Free Speech Clause.” Concurring in that decision, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “Under the Constitution, a government may not treat religious persons, religious organizations, or religious speech as second-class.”
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case involving the private prayer of a high school football coach, the Supreme Court emphasized how the Free Speech and Free Exercise of Religion Clauses “work in tandem”:
Where the Free Exercise Clause protects religious exercises, whether communicative or not, the Free Speech Clause provides overlapping protection for expressive religious activities. . . . That the First Amendment doubly protects religious speech is no accident. It is a natural outgrowth of the framers’ distrust of government attempts to regulate religion and suppress dissent.
The Court ultimately held:
Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.
(We submitted an amicus brief in support of the victorious Coach Kennedy.)
In response to our letter to the superintendent on behalf of our nine-year-old client, we received a letter from the attorney for the school district. The letter affirmed that “students are free to bring religious materials to school, and students can access those materials during non-instructional time in the same manner as non-religious materials.” It stated further, “The District will remind staff members that students are permitted to bring such materials to school to help ensure consistency in the future.”
The letter also expressed regret for what happened and apologized. It indicated that the superintendent and teacher would reach out to the family directly.
Just because the law is clear on a constitutional issue doesn’t mean that public officials, including school officials, are aware of that clarity. That’s where the work of the ACLJ comes in. The ACLJ stands ready to vindicate the rights of our clients when their First Amendment liberties are questioned or violated.