This post originally appeared on TheHumanist.com June 17 marks the 52nd anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case, Abington School District v. Schempp, that declared unconstitutional a state law requiring public schools to start each day with a reading from the Bible. Coming just a year after the court’s Engel v. Vitale decision prohibiting school-sponsored prayer, the 1963 Abington case arguably marks the high point for church-state separation in the United States. There have been some important subsequent victories, of course, but never has the general consensus on Establishment Clause jurisprudence been stronger than during the early sixties, when even the nation’s president, John F.
This post originally appeared on TheHumanist.com If America’s Supreme Court justices could have spent a day this spring at Valencia High School, they would have seen decades of legal theory debunked in minutes. Specifically, what transpired in that California school would have demonstrated to the justices that the legal concept known as “ceremonial deism” is based on entirely false assumptions. Like other schools around the country, the class of Barry Gardner, a health teacher at Valencia, starts the day with the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. One morning, however, a freshman student (we’ll call him Justin), decided to assert his constitutional right to sit out the Pledge exercise.
