Recently in what's god got to do with it - pledge wars and prayer in schools Category

The article is here but is registration only. I'll post the entire thing, as it's all relevant. Two impressions: 1) It's depressing that Newdow has to jump through so many hoops to protect his plaintiffs from the defenders of God. And 2) Lost in this story is a strong indication that Newdow has his ducks in a row this time. SCOTUS was able to breathe a sigh of relief when it booted Newdow on standing grounds last time around, but Newdow appears to have cured his Standing issue by assembling a boatload of plaintiffs with some compelling constitutional injuries. Underscoring those injuries is the very fact that Newdow was able to so easily procure this anon deal for his plaintiffs - and apparently without dispute from the opposing side. Anyway, salut to Newdow, who is performing a thankless task on behalf of all atheists and agnostics - the last remaning classes of law-abding persons who can be openly discriminated against.

Accord shields Newdow allies
New challenge to Pledge of Allegiance keeps names of eight co-plaintiffs secret.
By Denny Walsh -- Bee Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

To avoid "potential harm" to eight people who have joined avowed atheist Michael Newdow in a quest to strike "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, a federal judge agreed Tuesday to allow them to remain anonymous during what is sure to be a closely watched legal fight over the highly charged issue.

Newdow, who filed the lawsuit using pseudonyms for all the plaintiffs except himself, proposed in a motion to keep anonymous the names of the parents and students in Sacramento County and San Joaquin County school districts.

Attorneys for the defendants - Congress, the federal government, California, and five school districts in Sacramento and San Joaquin counties and a top official from each district - ratified the proposal in a written agreement.

"It is believed that disclosure of the actual and true names of either the children or their parents will subject the minor children (and their parents) to potential harm," Newdow wrote in his motion.

The written agreement, approved by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton, decrees that the true identities of the four adults and four children "will be protected from disclosure" and "will be deemed 'confidential information.'"

Craig Blackwell, a senior trial counsel with the U.S. Department of Justice who represents the federal defendants, declined to oppose the motion because of the contents of a sworn statement by Newdow attached to the complaint and "certain allegations" in the complaint.

The identities of the plaintiffs will be available to defense attorneys "for the purpose of obtaining information necessary to defend the case," the agreement provides.

The names also will be available to Karlton "or any other officer who presides over any proceeding in the case, and to court reporters as necessary."

Papers that contain the true names may be used in court "if the documents are filed under seal."

Newdow initially submitted a motion to Karlton asking that his co-plaintiffs be allowed to proceed anonymously and never have to personally appear in court. The motion sought to have them testify through depositions under their pseudonyms should the need for their testimony arise.

The agreement approved Tuesday sidestepped the matter of testimony, saying only, "That issue will be discussed by the parties at a later date."

This is Newdow's second time around trying to get the phrase out of the pledge, and he says he wants his fellow plaintiffs spared the harassment and abuse he has already encountered.

In the earlier case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals touched off a national furor when it sided with Newdow, but his victory was short-lived. The U.S. Supreme Court found Newdow, the lone plaintiff, lacked standing to sue because he is not the primary custodian of his daughter.

Her daily exposure to the pledge in an Elk Grove public schoolroom was at the heart of that case.

To rid himself of that problem in the new case, filed in January, Newdow enlisted four custodial parents of students in Sacramento County and San Joaquin County school districts, as well as the students themselves, to serve as co-plaintiffs.

Newdow, an emergency room physician and nonpracticing lawyer, is acting as the only attorney for the plaintiffs.

Attached to the motion are the affidavits of a parent and three students, none of whom are involved in the litigation but who were either physically attacked or ostracized and ridiculed because of stands they took against religion in the classroom.

In the declaration attached to the complaint, Newdow describes the abusive reactions to his first lawsuit:

"I was repeatedly told that I should leave the country.

"Strangers left messages on my answering machine, calling me, among other things, ... a 'sick son of a bitch,' an 'imbecilic bastard,' a 'traitor,' a 'stupid whore,' ...

"Strangers also at times identified me in public. I was referred to as 'the freak' in public, when I was with my child."

He also recounted in the declaration that on March 26, 2004 - two days after oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the first case - a talk he was invited to make at the University of Toledo was delayed by a bomb threat.

In the second complaint, Newdow alleges one of the unnamed plaintiffs "has suffered harassment by other students" because of the child's refusal to recite the pledge.

Another of the plaintiffs "has been singled out and castigated" by a teacher for not reciting the pledge, "and has even been forced into a different seat because of (an) unwillingness to compromise religious principles."

A third unnamed plaintiff "recites the pledge, but leaves out the words 'under God.'" Because of that, the child "has been singled out and ostracized by other students" and "now attends school fearful of ridicule and other social consequences."

Blackwell wrote in his brief that the allegations, "if true, could support a need for anonymity. Defendants assume the good faith of these allegations, and that plaintiffs could, if necessary, support these allegations with declarations."

This is one of those stories where you can't really tell what's going on:

A religious liberties law firm accused Plano school officials today of violating students' constitutional rights by forbidding them to hand out candy canes and pencils with religious messages on them.

Attorneys with the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute said they planned to file a federal lawsuit claiming the district has an unconstitutional censorship policy that victimizes students.

[...]

Last week, Plano school officials sent a letter home requesting that parents not send their children to school with anything green or red this holiday season, Sasser said. All cups, plates, napkins and icing must be white or the children violate the district's policy, he said.

"These government officials have lost all common sense. This Christmastime and religious censorship is not the law and this discrimination must stop," said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for Liberty Legal Institute. "Our children are the ones suffering from this discrimination. Our schools are not zones of religious censorship."

These sue-happy Christian legal funds hype up these stories, and then when the truth comes out, it's considerably more ambiguous than the lawyers for Jesus Everywhere In Our Public Schools Legal Partners let on in the beginning.

One thing you have to keep in mind about Plano, Texas, is that it is a suburb of Dallas full of fairly conservative and well-off people. Most of the residents of that suburb would probably self-identify as some sort of Christian (and the vast majority of those would be evangelical Protestants), and at the very least suggest that they go to church on a regular basis. The school district personnel come from a similar milieu. They're not in the business of smashing Christianity out of the schools.

But the one thing that the Liberty Legal Institute probably knows but is deliberately ignoring here is that not every kid in the Plano ISD is an evangelical Christian. In fact, I'll suggest that one very possible reason for the de-emphasis on Christmas at school is that there are children from other religious traditions at school who neither celebrate Christmas or in fact are hostile to the celebration of Christmas.

One of the ugly little secrets of holiday celebration in the public schools is that Jehovah's Witness children have to sit out due to their religious beliefs. One of my sister's kids was in a class where all the Jehovah's Witness kids in that grade at the school had been placed: it made for an interesting school year as the teacher tried to work around the fact that there were four 2nd graders in the class who could not acknowledge holidays. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that Plano ISD was trying to be accommodating to kids who could not celebrate any holidays whatsoever, or holidays not of their religion.

But the other thing that is not clear from the article is what exactly the hardcore Christian parents were sending to school with their kids. Candy canes with Bible verses and Jesus pencils sound innocuous, but these are not things that you can just pick up at the grocery store; you have to make a special trip to Family Christian or Berean Books or Zondervan to buy these. And I rather doubt that the kiddies were suggesting to their parents that they hand out Jesus pencils; rather, the parents were giving the kids the pencils and telling them to hand them out in school.

Ultimately, this is not about pencils or candy canes, but pencils and candy canes are being used as wedges to prop open the door of the schoolhouse for proselytising. The Liberty Legal Institute is looking for a way to open the door for students proselytising other students where the parents of the target ("non-Christian") students can't complain because it's been legally approved by a judge. So, red and green napkins are a ruse to distract from a more disturbing agenda.