Hunterdon Country, New Jersey is a half-suburban, half-rural county in Northeastern, New Jersey and one of the few slightly conservative areas of the state. Yet, when a six-year-old second grader wanted to sing Awesome God for her part in an after school talent show, the school administration said no. Their argument was that singing the song was equivalent to a spoken prayer.
Now, two years later a Federal Judge has sided with the student, but mainly as the show was voluntary and not part of the formal curriculum. And the school will continue to keep an eye out for religious content.
Yes, let's order another metal detector while spending tens of thousands of tax payer dollars on lawyers to keep God out of our schools.
The Liberal education establishment is running this damned country into the ground.
New Jersey elementary school student's First Amendment rights were violated when her school district barred her from singing a religious song at an after-school talent show, a federal judge has ruled.
The parents of Olivia Turton sued the Frenchtown Elementary School District Board of Education in May 2005. Administrators in the Hunterdon County district denied the then-second-grader's request to perform "Awesome God," saying its lyrics amounted to the "musical equivalent of a spoken prayer."
U.S. District Court Judge Freda L. Wolfson issued a 26-page decision Monday calling the district's actions inappropriate, saying Olivia's song was one student's "private speech" and could not legitimately be perceived as a public school's endorsement of religion.
"We're excited for Olivia that she'll be able to sing her song," the Turtons' lawyer, Demetrios Stratis, said yesterday. "A student doesn't lose her First Amendment rights just because she walks onto school property. ...To suggest that she at 8 years old is going to proselytize to this audience is nonsense, and the court saw through that."
Olivia, now a fourth-grader, will sing "Awesome God" at the next installment of the "Frenchtown Idol" talent show in May, Stratis said.
The district does not plan to appeal the decision, Frenchtown school board President Andrew Longman said yesterday.
The case drew national attention and the backing of strange legal bedfellows: The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advo cacy group that represented the Turtons, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which intervened as a friend of the court. Both organizations praised the judge's decision yesterday but offered different interpretations of its impact.
"What the case does is provide precedent and authority to cite for school districts in New Jersey and around the country that you have to respect religious speech and treat it in the same form as all other speech," ADF attorney Jeremy Tedesco said. "It's a very clear and honestly a blunt decision that rules very clearly that religious speech can't be treated as second- class."
While Tedesco called the ACLU partially responsible for spreading "fear and intimidation" that leads to schools' apprehension about religion, ACLU-NJ Executive Director Deborah Jacobs cited the organization's "longstanding dedication to defending religious freedom."
"A student has every right to speak on topics that concern religion," said Jennifer Klear, the ACLU's attorney in the case, adding the decision does not give public schools license to incorporate religion into their curriculum. "I think the distinction here is that it was after school. If a teacher was going to distribute the same song, 'Awesome God,' in class, there's a clear difference in that case."
Wolfson ruled the talent show, called "Frenchtown Idol" after the Fox hit "American Idol," was a voluntary event, not part of the curriculum and conducted with limited school oversight.
Students' individual performances there -- ranging from yo-yo tricks to renditions of Bon Jovi to Turton's eventual choice of a number from "Annie" -- could therefore not be seen as the school's "public expression," the judge wrote.
The song in question, by Christian writer Rich Mullins, includes lyrics such as the verse: "Our God is an awesome God/He reigns from heaven above/with wisdom, pow'r and love/Our God is an awesome God."
If Olivia asks to sing it next spring, the school will abide by the court's decision and permit the performance, said Longman, the school board president. Future requests about religious content will be handled on a case-by-case basis, he said.
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