"Pretend this meeting never happened"

It seems that unreality is not limited to the borders of the Morrisville school board's domain.

This article talks about the South Iron Missouri School District, who got in trouble with the way they dealt with religion in the school. That's not quite Morrisville's problem. The paragraphs describing the school board however, are classic Morrisville.

"...And the fact that the school board repeatedly ignored the advice of their own superintendent, their own attorney, the attorneys for the state association of school boards and the attorney for their insurance company (which voided their liability policy as a result, just like in Dover) and refused to change that policy even after being told by all of them that allowing the Gideons to do so was unconstitutional.

And the fact that the school board actually voted to "pretend this meeting never happened" when those attorneys all told them they had to change their policy. It was only a few days before a court hearing on a preliminary injunction that the school board, under advice of Staver's legal group, finally and reluctantly changed their mind and instituted an open forum policy. But they also made it clear that they didn't think there was anything wrong with the old policy."

"Pretend the meeting never took place!" I can only imagine who might make that motion.

Staver Lies About Court Case

Category: Politics
Posted on: July 10, 2008 9:16 AM, by Ed Brayton

And the odds of that were about, oh, 1 to 1. In this article at OneNewsNow, Matt Staver, head of Liberty Counsel and Falwell's law school, tells more whoppers about the facts and outcome of a case involving the distribution of Gideon bibles in an elementary school in the South Iron School District in Missouri. The lies begin with the headline of the article:

ACLU given 'veto power' over free-speech rights

Not even close. The case didn't even have anything to do with free speech rights, it was an establishment clause case. And this idea of the ACLU having "veto power" is a ridiculous way to spin the ruling (which you can see in full here). And boy is Staver spinning:

The South Iron School District allows off-campus organizations to distribute literature to students before and after school, and during other non-instructional times such as lunch breaks. But the American Civil Liberties Union sued, saying the Gideons should not be allowed to hand out Bibles because of their religious nature. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry agreed.

True to form, the AFA's news site leaves just a few inconvenient facts out of the story. Like the fact that the suit was filed not against a policy that allows off-campus organizations to distribute literature, but against a policy that allowed only the Gideons to do so, and that further gave the Gideons access to 5th grade classrooms during instructional time, something court after court has struck down as clearly unconstitutional.

And the fact that the school board repeatedly ignored the advice of their own superintendent, their own attorney, the attorneys for the state association of school boards and the attorney for their insurance company (which voided their liability policy as a result, just like in Dover) and refused to change that policy even after being told by all of them that allowing the Gideons to do so was unconstitutional.

And the fact that the school board actually voted to "pretend this meeting never happened" when those attorneys all told them they had to change their policy. It was only a few days before a court hearing on a preliminary injunction that the school board, under advice of Staver's legal group, finally and reluctantly changed their mind and instituted an open forum policy. But they also made it clear that they didn't think there was anything wrong with the old policy.

That's why the judge refused to moot the case based on the voluntary cessation doctrine, because the school board had clearly changed its policy only to get out from under the case. But in doing so, they also made quite clear that their sole objective in the process was to endorse Christianity by preserving some way, any way, for the Gideons to get into the school and hand out bibles.

The judge in this case, citing the Lemon test prohibition on any policy which does not have a clear secular purpose, said:

The undisputed evidence here shows that the District's purpose in passing the new policy was the promotion of Christianity, and therefore it violates the Establishment Clause.

All of this flows directly from the Supreme Court's rulings in Santa Fe and McCreary, where the court analyzed similar situations where the government attempted after the fact to change their policy but left clear evidence of their religious intent behind in the process. There is a case to be made against such reasoning, but a district court is bound to apply the precedents as they are.

"In fact, the federal judge said...the ACLU must be able to have the say-so over whether religious literature can be distributed -- and obviously, if the ACLU has that say-so, no religious literature will ever be distributed," says Matt Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel.

This is a flat out lie, plain and simple. The judge said nothing even close to that. The ruling doesn't give the ACLU "veto power" over anything. The ACLU represented the plaintiffs and the court agreed with the plaintiffs that existing precedent required the conclusion that this policy was unconstitutional. That's it.

But Staver points out that the First Amendment prohibits any "heckler" from having the right to prohibit free speech. "...The ACLU may not like the fact that equal access also means equal treatment for religious speech, but, frankly, the Constitution requires equal treatment," states the attorney. "...Hecklers may heckle all they want to, but they may not veto private religious speech."

I think David Gibbs is going to have a hard time catching Staver in the competition for the title of the nation's loopiest religious right attorney. Arguments like this are simply laughable. If you analyzed this ruling for a con law 1 class in law school and pretended that the case had something to do with the heckler's veto and private speech, the professor would not only flunk you he might also suggest that you make a different career choice.