Attorney Sees Pro-Islam Bias in Religious Indoctrination Case Rulings
by Chad Groening
October 18, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A spokesman for a Michigan-based law center that defends and promotes the religious freedom of Christians says a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear an Islamic indoctrination case indicates that Islam is "in" and Christianity is "out."The Thomas More Law Center represented the parents of the California seventh-graders who were subjected to an intensive, three-week indoctrination in Islam at school. The students were forced to become Muslims, in effect, and were not allowed to say anything critical about the religion.
The original trial court and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the indoctrination as constitutional. And now that the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal, the Ninth Circuit's ruling will stand.
Edward L. White III, trial counsel for the Thomas More Law Center, says the Byron Union School District in Contra Costa County, California, simply went too far with this school assignment. "The parents in this case objected to it," he explains, "not because Islam was being taught in the school, but because the school had crossed the line and started to teach the religion."
In other words, the school, "instead of teaching about the religion, started teaching the children to become Muslims," White says. "And the parents had never been told beforehand what was going to go on." But the problem of insufficient parental notification is only one of a number of issues of concern.
The pro-family attorney has serious questions about why the court would allow a school to compel students to become followers of Islam as a school exercise. That is particularly problematic, he suggests, when the court would almost certainly have rejected a similar exercise involving other religious faiths as obviously impermissible.
"Everyone knows if Christianity, for example, had been taught the same way as Islam had been taught in this class, that the ACLU would have been in federal court within minutes," White asserts, "and the same judge who ruled against us would have ruled in favor of the ACLU and not allowed a class on Catholicism."
The Thomas More Law Center spokesman doubts such a class would make it out of court -- if it even managed to get a hearing. "Even if you wanted to call it cultural education or just fun, it would never happen," the lawyer asserts. "So if we know it's not going to happen with Christianity or with Judaism, for example, it shouldn't happen with Islam," he says.
"If you're going to uphold the Establishment Clause, then the Establishment Clause has to be applied equally," White adds. But apparently, he observes, while the Ninth Circuit is perfectly willing to rule "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, Muslim indoctrination is perfectly okay with the court.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
