Religious Liberty Advocates Defend Fifth-Grade Censorship Victim
by Jim Brown
June 22, 2004
(AgapePress) - A Michigan school is being sued for censoring a fifth-grade student's classroom project because of its religious content. Joel Curry had one shot at taking part in Classroom City, an economic simulation, in which students at Handley School in Saginaw create a product and sell it to other classmates and visiting parents, using school generated money. Curry's product was a homemade candy-cane ornament with an attached message explaining the religious origin of candy canes.
Officials at Handley School told the fifth grader his project violated the so-called "separation of church and state" and that he could not sell his ornaments unless the attached message was removed. However, the Alliance Defense Fund, which has filed a lawsuit on Curry's behalf in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Michigan, is asking the court to declare that the law does not allow the kind of discrimination.
Attorney Joshua Carden with the Alliance Defense Fund says school officials were wrong to tell Curry they do not allow distribution of religious literature during the school day. "That's just a completely erroneous statement. There's no separation of church and state issue when you've got a clearly private speaker who is selling his product," he says.
Furthermore, Carden points out that Curry was not handing his project out at random to fellow classmates but was "selling it as part of this school assignment, and the only way another member of the school community could have even received one of these is if they bought it at his little cardboard store."
The attorney feels the school engaged in "latent" anti-Christian discrimination, which he says often happens "mostly out of just a sheer misunderstanding of the First Amendment law, and when it happens that leads them to censor the speech of private speakers -- in this case, students, who have the right to, when they have an open assignment, make a product to sell."
Carden notes that the Supreme Court has never forbidden children in public schools from wishing each other "Merry Christimas," singing Christmas carols, or passing out candy canes or Christmas cards in school. However, he says, "What Joel Curry is being told is that religious products are unwelcome in the marketplace, and he needs to go to the back of the bus as a second-class citizen."
ADF is a legal alliance of more than 700 lawyers working to defend religious freedom through strategy, funding, education, and litigation. ADF's attorneys are hoping the lawsuit filed on Curry's behalf will help send the message that public school students do not leave their First Amendment rights at the school door.
