North Carolina School District Urged Not to Ban Bible Distribution
By Ed Thomas, OneNewsNow.com
A public-interest law firm that specializes in First Amendment and religious free-speech cases has sent a letter to the school district in Cumberland County, North Carolina, advising its superintendent that the district didn’t have to implement a new policy that bans community groups from leaving Bibles outside its elementary school campuses.
A recent report from Associated Press detailed the district’s decision to ban the distribution after a claim made by the American Civil Liberties Union that allowing the Bibles violates the U.S. Constitution. According to that report, the ACLU states that “impressionable young students” would tend to think the school was promoting the Bible by providing copies to them.
But the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) wrote the superintendent last week, informing him there is nothing illegal about leaving the materials for voluntary pick-up, provided literature from other outside groups are not prohibited as well.
Citing the case of Good News Club v. Milford School, ADF says U.S. Supreme Court rulings do not support the ACLU’s claim that students may interpret the availability of Bibles from an outside group as an endorsement of religion by the school. Rather, ADF says the high court ruled in the case that an outside group’s religious activity cannot be prohibited “on the basis of what the youngest members of the audience might misperceive.”
“So long as the district permits outside groups to distribute religious and nonreligious materials on a neutral basis, it does not violate the Establishment Clause to permit the distribution of Bibles as well,” says ADF senior legal counsel David Cortman in a press release. But if the school were to ban Bibles in the context of such a free-speech forum, he notes, that would violate the free-speech clause in the First Amendment.
(Source: OneNewsNow.com)
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