Is the government obligated to control the way people pray in public?  The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide this very question.  You see, the Town of Greece, NY has been sued because, when they open their town council meetings, they refused to censor the prayers of citizens who volunteered to deliver the opening invocation.  Rather, the Town allowed the volunteers to deliver the prayers in their own words and according to their faith tradition.  Any resident of the town could volunteer and they were scheduled on a first come first serve basis.  Although most of the people who volunteered to deliver the invocations were some flavor of Christianity, over the years a variety of faiths perspectives were offered, including Wiccan, Jewish, and Baha’i.   However, this “open to all” policy didn’t satisfy the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and its clients.

While generally frustrated that the Town opened its meetings with a prayer, the thrust of the complaint by the two “offended” participants was that they had to listen to prayers that mentioned Christian beliefs or closed in the name of Jesus.  Ultimately, the litigants asserted that the town had an obligation to censor the prayers to prohibit distinctly Christian prayers in favor of the more generic prayers they were willing to listen to.  This would put the town in the awkward role of Prayer Editor. Fortunately the trial court saw the ridiculousness of what the litigants were asking for and ruled for the Town. However the ruling was overturned on appeal. Now the Supreme Court will decide.

Thirty years ago the Supreme Court wrote that public prayer was a part of the “fabric of our society” when it ruled on Marsh v. Chambers. This case was against the State of Nebraska because they hired a Presbyterian minister to open each day of the legislative session with a Christian prayer.  The Supreme Court reviewed the history of legislative prayer and found that Congress hired chaplains to pray for their deliberation as they wrote the Bill of Rights.  More than 225 years later, Congress continues to hire chaplains to deliver legislative prayers every day they are in session. The words of the First Amendment remain unchanged.  The Supreme Court reasoned that Americans remain as free as the Founders were to pray.

Despite the clear ruling in Marsh, hundreds of towns and counties throughout America find themselves under attack by groups seeking to stop the practice of opening public meetings with prayer.  Since 2004, twenty different federal lawsuits have been filed demanding that local governments censor or abandon this historic tradition.  But a few people should not be able to extinguish the traditions of our nation merely because they may hear something they don’t like.

The Supreme Court’s decision to review Galloway v. Town of Greece, NY sets the stage for the Court to reaffirm that Americans today remain as free as the Founders were to pray.  It’s perfectly constitutional to allow community members to ask for God’s blessing according to their conscience. And we pray this tradition will stand throughout the end of time.

I’m thinking of getting my nails done this weekend. And I know that when I walk in, I will not be confronted with blood, urine, feces, and flea-infested animals.

What makes me so confident that I won’t get a disease from the beauty parlor?

As the Kermit Gosnell Grand Jury reported, “even nail salons…are monitored more closely for client safety” than abortion businesses.

When states do finally start to inspect abortionists, they find horrors like those in Gosnell’s operation. He was no back-alley abortionist wielding a coat hanger; he murdered living, breathing babies and women out in the open, and stored their bodies in jars, milk jugs, and cat food containers. He never bothered to hire licensed medical staff, relying instead on his beautician wife. His instruments were rusty and broken, and his hallways were so narrow that EMTs couldn’t get through to save his victims.

Both Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation knew what was going on – they even called Gosnell’s business “beyond redemption.” But they decided to protect abortion instead of protecting women, and they did not report him.

Similarly, Virginia inspected Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion facilities in 2012. These were not random inspections; the clinics knew inspectors were coming. Yet every single facility had serious violations, including the remains of unborn children and blood frozen to the bottom of freezers, sponges that were used to clean surgical instruments over and over for a full week before being changed, and staff admitting not knowing which instruments were clean and which were dirty.

Why don’t more states enact regulations like Virginia’s, or at least try to enforce whatever they have? The Gosnell Grand Jury found that states’ “neglect of abortion patients’ safety and of…laws is clearly not inadvertent: It is by design.”

When a pro-life administration such as that of Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey, Sr., governs a state, abortion facilities are inspected annually to stop abortionists like Gosnell from preying on women and innocent children. But when pro-choice Governor Tom Ridge got into office, the inspections stopped – he was cowed by the pro-abortion Left and worried about “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions. One Grand Jury witness testified that “there was a concern that if they did routine inspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency], and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion.”

Are the so-called “clinics” that bad, that an inspection would result in their closure? If so, politicians and bureaucrats are doing women no favors by deliberately choosing not to conduct regular inspections of abortion facilities.

Pro-abortion partisan politics leaving women to be herded in for abortions in a “bad gas station restroom”…sounds pretty ugly, doesn’t it?

By Rory Gray, Alliance Defending Freedom Litigation Counsel
 
Some preschoolers in Montana got quite a shock late last year when they were told that the state’s department of education had cut tuition aid that they were promised under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) because they attend religious schools.  You see, these particular students struggle with learning disabilities.  So the federal government helps to ensure that they receive early schooling that prepares them to succeed in kindergarten. Because Montana does not provide a public preschool program, disabled students in that state attend private preschools or none at all.  The family of one particular preschooler, N.W., who has hearing and speech impairments chose to place her in a Christian school that shared their religious beliefs and offered their daughter individualized services that had been highly successful in helping her adjust to a classroom environment.  In fact, a local school district official had recognized—in writing—that N.W.’s school is a wonderful place with staff ready and willing to help students with special needs.
 

In Cooperstown, North Dakota, Michayla Maertens joined other students in putting up posters along the halls of Griggs County Central High School, as part of a class assignment requiring them to actively advocate for a current health-related issue by taking some specific action, like creating and displaying items at school. Michayla’s poster took on the subject of abortion, and featured a collage of pro-life messages such as “Life Not Abortion.”

Soon after, the school’s principal told Michayla the poster would have to come down: a parent had called and complained. Michayla’s family contacted Alliance Defending Freedom, and our attorneys sent the school district a letter, reminding administrators of certain pertinent passages in the First Amendment. The letter also pointed out that “a mere complaint cannot justify silencing expression” and that “the poster did not materially and substantially interfere with the school since the poster hung for approximately two weeks without causing any problems.”

“We would like to thank Alliance Defending Freedom for the clarity they provided in their letter,” the principal quickly responded, agreeing to re-post the poster. “In regards to the First Amendment and free speech, we feel that there needs to be more clarity for public schools.”

Administrators at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah are seeing things more clearly, too. Last fall, when a student group, the Solid Rock Christian Club, painted their assigned window with a cross and a Christian message during the campus Homecoming celebrations, school officials stopped them, saying they weren’t allowed to “paint any religious symbols or anything related to religion.” Later, another of their club messages was removed from another building, because, officials said, displaying a Christian message was “in poor taste.”  (It may not surprise you to learn these same administrators treated other clubs with religious affiliations very differently.)

But Snow College’s opposition has now melted, in the face of a lawsuit filed by Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of the Solid Rock club. In a settlement with our attorneys, officials have agreed “not to adopt or enforce the provisions of the old policies…that deny student organizations ‘associated with religious institutions’ the privileges afforded other student organizations.” The change of policies is now fully implemented, and has been communicated to all Snow College students. Our attorneys, therefore, have voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit.
Administrators at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa, needed more of a nudge to change their policies restricting student speech to a single table in the student center, and requiring 10 days permission in advance for students wanting to hand out flyers. As I recently told you, our attorneys filed a lawsuit for this case, too, and last week came a court order compelling the college to quit enforcing those policies, while a settlement is reached with our client.

God is good, and He is so faithfully blessing your support for us, and the hard work of our staff and allied attorneys to defend religious freedom. Please continue to bless us with your prayers, gifts, and encouragement, as we work to keep a door open for the Gospel on the campuses of your children and grandchildren.

In February 2010, FBI agents finally raided the abortion business of Kermit Gosnell in search of drug violations. What they found was a massacre.

There was blood on the beds, floors, and charts, and aborted babies’ bodies were stored in jars, cat food containers, and a cherry limeade bottle as a kind of macabre trophy case. Gosnell used the same single-use-only supplies over and over, spreading STDs. Flea-infested cats roamed the building, which reeked of urine, death, and decay.

Gosnell employed no nurse and no medical staff as he committed thousands of dangerous, late-term abortions. His wife, a beautician, assisted him. Even though he was trained only as a family doctor, not an OB/GYN, he administered anesthesia and other drugs at hundreds of times the normal dose, and committed complex, life-destructive surgery day in and day out.

Gosnell joked about the size of the full-grown babies he was killing as they breathed and whimpered. Live babies were delivered on the floor or into toilets, where they swam in an attempt to live before being hunted down and murdered. The sewer system was regularly backed up from the bodies of flushed infants.

Gosnell also killed a Bhutanese refugee through a lethal dose of sedatives. At least one woman was tied up for a forced abortion when she changed her mind. He maimed scores of women, and likely committed infanticide hundreds of times or even more, but destroyed his files to protect himself from prosecution.

After years of willful blindness to complaints and to the stunning forty-six lawsuits filed against him over the years, state regulators finally shut down this travesty and suspended Gosnell’s license. We later learned that he had made millions from this abominable practice.

Gosnell’s trial began this March and ended May 13 with a guilty verdict: the killings were murder. After a near-total media blackout, with empty press benches in the courthouse, people finally began to notice. Shortly before the trial ended, the Today Show even asked President Obama about the trial. His response?:

“I can’t comment on it because it’s an active trial.”

Yet just a few years ago, Obama gave a very different answer. In July 2009, African-American Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discovered that the front door to his home was jammed shut. Someone spotted him trying to push the door open and called 911 to report a potential burglary. Police officers came and placed Gates under arrest.

The charges were dropped, but President Obama’s hackles were raised. Despite having limited knowledge of the situation, he jumped in to criticize the arrest and the police generally for racial profiling. After citizens nationwide leaped to the defense of police ethics, Obama hosted the Beer Summit in an attempt to be the Great Healer, with professor and policeman joining him for a cold one in the Rose Garden.

So Obama can interject himself into the media account of the brief arrest of his Harvard colleague, but he is not able to comment on sworn testimony of eyewitnesses that Gosnell gleefully murdered children?

As Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the spring of hope; it was the winter of despair.” Let us pray, as Charles Dickens did, for the return of an “age of wisdom,” when we can all label as evil, what is evil.

Mr. President, the White House beer summit was a “teachable moment.” So now that he’s been convicted of murdering innocent babies, what have you learned from Gosnell’s House of Horrors?

In a dramatic reversal, high school officials in North Dakota immediately changed their decision to censor a student’s pro-life message when they received a letter from Alliance Defending Freedom.  This story of belief and repentance began when a student put up a pro-life poster in a school hallway as part of a health class assignment which called students to display posters and brochures about a health-related issue of their choosing. But when the pro-life poster went up, parents complained to the principal and on Facebook. Caving to these complaints, the principal then had the poster removed. Thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. Alliance Defending Freedom quickly informed the officials about their unconstitutional acts, and the very next day after receiving the letter, the officials agreed to apologize to the student and to return her pro-life poster to the hallway.

This story illustrates that the message of life can be a message of death to some. Some people just do not like the message that innocent human life is more valuable than their own agendas, thus the complaints about the pro-life poster. Thankfully, a message doesn’t lose First Amendment protection just because it offends someone. Indeed, as then Judge Alito explained, “[t]he Supreme Court has held time and again, both within and outside of the school context, that the mere fact that someone might take offense at the content of speech is not sufficient justification for prohibiting it.” Saxe v. State College Area School Dist., 240 F.3d 200, 215 (3rd Cir.2001).

But the story also illustrates the value of repentance. Though the school officials should be thoroughly condemned for violating the First Amendment and caving to a few complaints, they should also be praised for quickly reversing themselves and restoring the pro-life speech. It’s never easy for anyone to admit they were wrong. But it’s even harder to do it immediately after being called to account and to follow through on that admission with changed behavior. Like Zacchaeus, the school officials demonstrated true repentance: their changed acts accompanied their changed profession. Thus, they formally apologized to the student and returned her pro-life policy to the hallway.

Finally, the story illustrates the value of belief. The student in North Dakota believed in her pro-life message enough to proclaim it to others. She also believed in this message and in her First Amendment rights enough to stand up for them. Thus, the real hero in the story is not the school officials, just as the real hero in the story of Zacchaeus is not Zachaeus. Rather, the hero is the one who proclaims good news to others. In this situation in North Dakota, it was the freshman student at Griggs County Central High School. She proclaimed the good news about the value of human life and made sure to defend this message. Like this student, we should all believe strongly enough in our messages of good news to do the same.
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If you ever find your free speech being censored while at school, contact us.

In Minnesota, for instance, a sixth grader at Nova Classical Academy was one of several students handing out pro-life fliers to other students during their lunch break. They weren’t making a big deal about it, or forcing the fliers on students who didn’t express an interest. This is just an issue these students care about. (One flier read, “Save the baby humans. Stop abortion.”)

A few days later, the students were called into the school director’s office and told they were no longer allowed to pass these kinds of fliers out – during or after school hours, and even if students requested them – because some students find such pro-life fliers offensive.

Besides, the director said, school policy requires a student to get “prior approval from an administrator” before engaging in free speech. An email to the student’s parents said that the content of the fliers was inconsistent with the school’s educational mission and that “such political activism is limited to students in the School of Rhetoric [the high school] only.”

“The school has a right to censor students without violating their free speech,” the director wrote. “In short, public schools have every right to prohibit student speech.”

In fact – as our attorneys point out in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the sixth grader – the “Academy’s literature distribution policy leaves censorship of student speech to the whim of Academy officials” and exhibits “hostility toward religious expression.” Plus, it turns out, “the Academy has allowed other similarly situated students to distribute written materials containing secular expression during non-instructional time.” (Paul Harvey used to call that “selective indignation.”)

“The law on this is extremely clear,” says Legal Counsel Matt Sharp. “Free speech cannot be censored simply because it expresses a certain viewpoint that administrators don’t favor. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech for all students, regardless of their religious or political beliefs.” (Stanley Zahorsky, one of more than 2,200 allied attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom, is serving as local counsel in this case.)

Senior Counsel David Cortman points out, the implications of cases like this go far beyond a school’s right to take away a student’s First Amendment protections.

“This influences a lifetime,’” he says. “If we don’t stand with a child who stands for his faith in elementary school, that child is taught that there is something wrong with his faith. He won’t just keep silent in elementary school – he won’t speak up in high school, or on his college campus, or when he goes out into the world as an adult. Studies show that more than 60 percent of our children are walking away from their faith by the time they get out of college.  That desertion begins here, when they are young, when they’re taught not to talk about or live out their faith.”

So much depends on our ability to safeguard the religious freedom and First Amendment-protections of your children and grandchildren. Please pray for our attorneys, coast to coast, as they work to keep a door open for the Gospel … even on our grade school campuses.

I’m often surprised by the number of school administrators under the mistaken belief that the First Amendment has an age limit. They think that while a kid is in elementary or middle school, they can stop them from expressing their views and that kids have to wait until high school to have constitutional rights.

They stand at the school house door, like the ticket collectors with a “You must be this tall to ride” sign at a carnival ride, blocking kids that are “not old enough” from handing out religious flyers or expressing a pro-life viewpoint.

That is exactly what happened to A.Z., a 6th grade student at Nova Classical Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota. When she and her friends tried to distribute pro-life flyers and decorations during lunch to their classmates who wanted them, they were told that they couldn’t hand them out. When A.Z.’s father, Nick Zinos, contacted the executive director of the school seeking an explanation, the director told Mr. Zinos that only students in the high school have the right to engage in “political, religious, and controversial speech.” The director went on to claim that “the school has a right to censor students without violating their free speech.”

But A.Z. and her parents knew that her First Amendment rights could not be postponed until she is in high school. So they contacted Alliance Defending Freedom, and last week, we filed a lawsuit against the Academy. A.Z.’s case is just the latest in a long line of cases that we have filed in recent years to protect the precious First Amendment rights of younger students. These are bright, outstanding students who are passionate about their faith and want to share it with their friend at school. They take to heart Paul’s encouragement to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4: “don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young.”

By God’s grace, we have obtained victory after victory after victory after victory after victory for these courageous students. And the message is getting out: more and more schools are realizing that they can no longer get away with censoring the speech of younger students. But as the A.Z. case shows, we must remain vigilant and continue to fight. Because no child should ever be told that they have to wait until they are older to share their faith at school.

To understand how important it is that we stop these challenges from reaching our own country, look no farther than Sweden, where two cases just last week reminded us how determined that government is to constrain Christian families’ religious freedom.

In 2010, Sweden’s parliament passed a law making parents criminally liable should they choose to home-school their children under anything other than “exceptional circumstances.” Jonas and Tamara Himmelstrand believed those circumstances applied to their daughter. A psychologist had diagnosed the girl with autism-spectrum disorder, and told them she would do better in a nurturing home environment.

The Himmelstrands applied for an exemption, based on that recommendation and the fact that their girl was clearly thriving in the home school setting. Swedish authorities not only denied their request, but fined them heavily for failing to comply with the law. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys have joined with the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) to represent the family in court, and judges have now lowered the fine some – but still refuse to dismiss it entirely, or allow the Himmelstrands to continue home-schooling. Unable to pay such an exorbitant amount, the family has now fled to Finland. Meanwhile, our attorneys and the HSLDA have appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

“Punishing this family with exorbitant fines for doing what they and the girl’s psychologist both agreed was best for her is reprehensible,” says Senior Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “Parents should have the freedom and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without government interference.” Besides which, he says, “The Swedish law violates the European Convention of Human Rights, to which Sweden is obligated.”

Sad as the Himmelstrands’ predicament is, Christer and Annie Johansson’s is even more tragic. Four years ago, their seven-year-old son was taken from them by force as they sat on an airplane, about to return from furlough to their mission field in Annie’s native India. While in Sweden, they had homeschooled their son – which at that time was not yet illegal. Nevertheless, without a warrant and without even charging the Johanssons with a crime, officials took their boy away.

Social services authorities placed the boy, Dominic, in foster care and a government school in 2009, allowing his parents to visit him first rarely – then not at all. Our attorneys and the HSLDA have been advising the family (represented by Ruby Harrold-Claesson of the Nordic Committee on Human Rights); a lower court restored the parents’ rights, but a higher one later reversed that decision. Now the case has been appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden.

“Instead of protecting its citizens, Sweden’s government has become a frightening threat,” says Kiska. “This is a tragedy and injustice of epic proportions, and we are asking Sweden’s highest court to right this egregious wrong.”

Alliance Defending Freedom and HSLDA are encouraging people to join an HSLDA-sponsored letter-writing campaign asking the court to accept the case and return Dominic to his parents. Please prayerfully consider joining that campaign, and pray for our global attorneys and allies as we work to defend religious freedom in Sweden and other nations … before we have to fight those same legal fights here at home.

During the anti-war protests in the 60s it was the folks on the left side of the aisle who screamed “censorship” any time one of their own was not allowed to speak because of their anti-war perspective. Their stand for what they thought was right resulted in a quite a few good Supreme Court cases protecting the right to speak out even when espousing views that are unpopular.

Now the tables are turned and it’s the conservative speakers who are being censored. Most recently, the radical left has called for Pastor Greg Laurie to be “disinvited“ from speaking at the National Day of Prayer events coming up this Thursday, May 2, in Washington, D.C. The National Day of Prayer Task Force, chaired by Mrs. Shirley Dobson, invited Pastor Laurie to be its honorary chairman for this year’s event. The problem is Pastor Laurie actually believes and teaches what the Bible has to say about sex and marriage.