Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

July-August 2013 – Once upon a time in America, the school day opened with prayer. Public school curricula often included the Bible. Football games and graduation ceremonies started with prayer, often led by a teacher or coach or pastor invited from the community.

However, U.S. Supreme Court rulings have held that such religious activities, when initiated by teachers, coaches or principals acting as government employees, violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Ironically, the Supreme Court has also recognized the religious liberty guaranteed to students by the Free Exercise Clause of that very same First Amendment.

It is that distinction that led the state of Mississippi to pass a law that clarifies the rights students have in the public schools. The law is called the Mississippi Student Religious Liberties Act of 2013.

AFA general counsel Pat Vaughn said, “The new Mississippi law empowers students to freely exercise their constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty and disentangles school administrators from dabbling in religion.”

In many respects, the law merely lines up school policy with existing law. For example, the Act states that a teacher cannot censor a religious viewpoint in a project once students have been told any topic is permissible. In other words, if students are told to paint a picture of anything they want, a teacher could not ban a student from painting Jesus Christ.

Also protected: If students are allowed leeway to wear T-shirts with a message, school administrators cannot ban a shirt simply because it carries a religious or conservative sentiment, such as a pro-life message. Similarly, if jewelry is allowed, religious items cannot be banned.

Where the Mississippi law breaks some new ground, however, is that it requires school administrators to establish a “limited public forum” for student speakers at school events, such as graduation ceremonies and football games.

A limited public forum is a First Amendment concept in which once the government has defined who can speak, such as high school seniors, or set the subject to be discussed, such as the topic of a city council meeting, then the speakers may express themselves in a government setting without their statements being attributed to the government.

As a result of the new law, school administrators would establish a limited public forum at, say, a football game and allow a student to open the game in any way he or she wanted. As long as the school did not tell the student that they must pray or say something religious, the student could do so if he or she chose. Many experts feel the law passes legal muster.

The school would also have to set up a neutral process for the selection of student participants. For example, a principal could not select only Christian young people to open the football game.

The model policy clarifies that the student may not engage in obscene, vulgar, offensively lewd or indecent speech.

“This provision transfers significant control over those events from the school administration to students,” said Vaughn. “Consequently, a student may choose whether or not to pray if he is designated to speak at the opening of an event.”

Vaughn said AFA is encouraging other states to pass similar laws in order to return a sense of balance to the public school system.

“Frankly, the rights of students to express their religion in the public sphere has been trampled on in many school systems for decades,” he added. “This model policy will hopefully be used to protect those rights across the country.”  

Read the statute here, then forward to your state lawmakers.