Judge: Bible distribution violated First Amendment
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A federal judge in New Orleans found today that the Tangipahoa Parish School Board violated the First Amendment by allowing Gideons International to pass out pocket Bibles to Loranger fifth-graders during school hours last year, court records show.
In an 11-page order, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier wrote the practice is unconstitutional under multiple legal standards in federal case law testing whether government and religion are too closely entangled.
The distribution of the Bibles was “ultimately coercive” on an elementary school child, “a religious activity without a secular purpose” and “amounted to promotion of Christianity by the School Board,” Barbier wrote.
Gideons International is “an interdenominational association of Christian business and professional men,” according to its Web site, and well-known for distribution of free Bibles.
Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, the father of an unnamed Loranger Middle School fifth-grader filed the suit against the School Board May 17, 2007. The father was identified only as “John Roe.” The child is his daughter, identified as “Jane Roe.”
In his order, Barbier granted a motion for summary judgment from the ACLU. The suit sought to halt the practice, court records show.
Summary judgment is granted if there is no dispute as to the “material facts” and those seeking summary judgment are “entitled to judgment as a matter of law,” Barbier wrote.
The ACLU suit alleges the students were given the option not to pick up the pocket Bibles from Gideons representatives in the school hallway during school hours in May 9, 2007.
Still, Barbier found that even with that option, the child was pressured to take a Bible, noting the special care that the courts have recognized schools must take with impressionable elementary school children, versus even secondary school children.
“Jane Roe states that she accepted the Bible because if she did not, her classmates would have ‘picked on’ her. She feared they would call her ‘devil worshipper,’ and that ‘she don’t [sic] believe in God,’ and that she is a ‘Goth,’” Barbier wrote.
The judge also rejected a motion for summary judgment from the School Board. In that motion, attorneys argued school officials did not encourage the children to take Bibles but “merely allowed an organization onto a school campus for the purpose of making literature available to students.”
Barbier’s ruling comes one day ahead of a hearing on the two sides’ motions. He has canceled the hearing and set a telephone conference for 9 a.m. April 29.
