A national Christian leader has implemented a program to reintroduce
the Ten Commandments into public schools around the country, ostensibly
without fear of recrimination from school officials, legal groups or the
federal government.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a nationally
recognized Christian minister, television show host and chancellor of
Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., told WorldNetDaily his
organization has published and distributed “unbelievable numbers” of
school book covers emblazoned not only with the Ten Commandments, but
also information citing numerous court cases supporting the action.
Falwell said families could order three free covers, but organizations
ordering book covers in bulk were being charged only for the cost of
production.
The result, Falwell said, has been to “legally saturate thousands of
public classrooms with God’s Law.” And, he added, parents who may be
reluctant to send their children to school with the book covers should
rest easy because all of the legal machinations surrounding the issue
have been investigated, documented, and are available for school
officials to inspect.
“A legal statement titled, ‘Students’ Rights On Public School
Campuses’ is printed on the back of each cover, detailing court rulings
which support the students’ right to use them,” Falwell said. “If a
teacher or other school official hassles a student over this issue, the
youth is encouraged to show that person the ‘legal statement.'” If
school officials persist, he said, the covers also list a toll-free
number for Liberty Counsel, a civil liberties defense firm affiliated
with Falwell Ministries, where a student can contact one of “65
constitutional attorneys … for pro bono representation.”
“It has been our experience thus far that, once Liberty Counsel has
talked with the school officials, the dispute is ended immediately,”
Falwell said. “Not one lawsuit has been necessary.”
Falwell said, “the Supreme Court started this mess” when, in 1980,
justices ruled that even a privately donated copy of the Ten
Commandments could not be posted on a public school bulletin board in
Kentucky. That case, Stone v. Graham, essentially outlawed any posting
of the Commandments, he said, and provided the impetus for a “chilling
effect on the free expression of religion in the public square,
especially for our nation’s millions of children who attend public
schools.”
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In its ruling, the Supreme Court said, “If the posted copies of the
Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the
school children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the
Commandments. (This) is not a permissible objective.”
Nevertheless, Falwell said, other court rulings have “left the door
open for students to express their religious freedom in a personal way.”
In 1969 the Court heard the case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent
School District and “established an important precedent that forms much
of the basis for understanding the rights of students on public school
campuses today.”
The Tinker case stemmed from Iowa students, ranging from second grade
to the 11th, who came to school wearing black armbands in protest of the
Vietnam War. The students were told to remove the armbands, but refused
and were threatened with suspension. A legal battle ensued, with the
case eventually landing on the Supreme Court’s docket.
In Tinker, the court ruled that “In our system, state-operated
schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not
possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as
well as out of school are ‘persons’ under the Constitution. They are
possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as
they themselves must respect the obligations to the State.” Furthermore,
the court recognized that students continue to carry their
constitutional freedoms whether “in the cafeteria, or on the playing
field or on the campus during the authorized hours.”
“It can hardly be argued,” the Court said, “that either students or
teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or
expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
“Like all citizens,” Falwell said, “the twin pillars of
constitutional freedom for public school students lie in the First
Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The
court has continued to uphold this position in more recent cases.”
Writing in the 1995 case, Capital Square Review v. Pinnette, Justice
Antonin Scalia said, “Private religious speech, far from being a First
Amendment orphan, is as protected under the Free Speech clause as
private secular speech.”
“Indeed,” Scalia continued, “in Anglo-American history, at least,
government suppression of speech has been so commonly directed precisely
at religious speech that a Free Speech clause without religion would be
like Hamlet without the prince.”
Other court rulings have expressed similar support for religious
speech.
Falwell said those rulings “have plainly said that students may not
only possess religious symbols and literature on public school campuses,
but may share their faith either verbally or through distribution of
leaflets or religious tracts, as long as that such
activities do not substantially interfere with the work of the school or
impinge upon the rights of other students.”
Matt Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, said
that students should not let school authorities intimidate them from
sharing their faith.
“The distribution of religious literature is a powerful tool,” Staver
said. “Students may distribute religious literature before or after
school while students are arriving on the campus.” And, he added, “bus
stops and hallways are prime areas for the distribution of literature.”
Outside of class time, Staver noted that students can legally “witness
or distribute literature during lunchtime in the cafeteria or on the
playing field.”
The American Civil Liberties Union was contacted but declined
comment. However, in published statements, the ACLU said it opposes any
use of public funding
for religious schools, the school prayer amendment offered by the 105th
Congress, and the Religious Liberty Protection Act of 1999. More to the point, the ACLU
has also opposed posting of the Ten Commandments near a school in Cleveland,
Ohio, and in a state judge’s chamber in Alabama.
In a related development, last week the U.S. Supreme Court refused to
hear four separate church-state cases, including a pair of cases from
Maine dealing with taxpayer-funded school vouchers for religious
schools. The ruling lets stand a federal appeals court ruling and a
Maine Supreme Court decision barring the use of tax money to pay for
tuition at religious schools.
The buried secret of the U.S. Senate
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