A Missouri school district has announced a settlement in a lawsuit with an anti-Christian group that claimed they violated the U.S. Constitution by promoting Christianity on the campus.
The anti-Christian American Humanist Association of Washington had filed a lawsuit in November 2013 against the Fayette School District on behalf of an “anonymous student” and “anonymous parent” who claimed the school wrongly promoted Christianity over other religions or no religion.
The complaint said that one of the school’s teachers prayed with students and that the high school’s principal announced weekly prayer meetings of a Christian group on the intercom.
The settlement was reached because the school said they did not want to spend more tax dollars fighting the anti-Christianists. The school added that while they did find one allegation was accurate, most of the complaints from the anti-Christian group were false, misleading or deliberately taken out of context.
The judge in the case has banned the schools’ teachers from participating in prayer or other religious activities at student events and prohibits teachers from having religious materials in sight of students.
The anti-Christian American Humanist Associated celebrated their latest removal of Christians from public life.
“Public schools must uphold the separation of church and state,” remarked AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt.
The ban in Maryland on prayers at government meetings praying in Jesus’ name has been lifted by a judge following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling the prayers are Constitutional.
U.S. District Court Judge William D. Quarles, Jr., had previously told the Carroll County Commissioners they could not pray at meetings after a lawsuit from the anti-Christian American Humanist Association. The group had claimed the Commissioners were endorsing a religion by praying.
Quarles had ruled with the anti-Christianists, saying that no specific deity could be mentioned in any kind of official capacity in the meeting.
Commissioner Robin Bartlett Frazier said that the judge’s order was infringing on [her] First Amendment rights of free speech and religion.
“I’m willing to go to jail over it,” Frazier declared. “[I]f we cease to believe that our rights come from God, we cease to be America. We’ve been told to be careful. But we’re going to be careful all the way to communism if we don’t start standing up and saying ‘no.’”
The Carroll County Commissioners opened their meeting on Tuesday with a prayer in Jesus’ name.
An anti-Christian group threatened to sue the grieving mother of a young man killed in an accident because she placed a cross at the accident site.
AnnMarie Devaney set up the cross after her son, a Christian, was killed when a car struck him as he crossed a street in Lake Elsinore. The memorial included a 5 foot tall cross because her son was a devoted Christian.
The anti-Christian American Humanist Association threatened to sue unless the cross was removed. The letter from the anti-Christianists was sent to the grieving mother a week after a judge backed the group’s suit to stop a veterans memorial in the city that would have a cross on it.
Community members rallied around the family and wanted to deliver a message to the anti-Christianists that their bigotry and intolerance would not be tolerated in their town. Residents created crosses of their own and placed them at the site of the accident saying that the only cross the anti-Christianists demanded removed was the cross of the dead man’s family.
“We did it like a homeschool project to teach (our children) about tolerance and not to be afraid of expressing what you believe,” Holly Alteneder said to the local Press-Enterprise newspaper.
The anti-Christian American Humanist Association has sent a threatening letter to a school in Minnesota that was working with a local church to feed starving children in Haiti.
The AHA claims parents of a student at the School of Engineering and Arts were angry that their children were taken to a local church where they packed boxes of food for starving children in Haiti. The food would be distributed through a Christian organization that focuses on feeding the hungry.
The packing of the boxes happened at a local Lutheran church and the AHA claims that just being there violates the student’s First Amendment rights. The group also objected to the fact the packages were called “manna” packages.
The school defended the action by saying the first through third graders participated in a valuable community service learning activity with hundreds of community residents.
“The students learn there are people the world who are not as fortunate as them,” Latisha Gray told Fox News. “They believe they are being a part of the solution.”
