Idaho school battle over Bible ongoing

OneNewsNow

Bill Bumpas

6/21/2010 5:45:00 AM

A court battle over the banning of religious books being used in Idaho school classrooms continues.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) filed an appeal with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals contesting a federal judge’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit it had filed on behalf of Nampa Classical Academy. The Idaho Public Charter School Commission had threatened to revoke the Academy’s charter if it used the Bible or other religious texts on its classroom resource list.

ADF senior legal counsel David Cortman says he is stunned by the censorship.

“We are talking about every school in the entire state of Idaho from kindergarten up through post-secondary school — we’re talking about colleges and universities — where every single book that can be deemed to be a religious document or text has been banned from study, whether it’s for objective study for art or history or literature or music,” Cortman states.

The ADF attorney adds that the education of students will suffer if the role and influence of the Christian faith in the nation’s history is ignored.

“How can our children be taught about — number one — America’s history and reading of our Founding Fathers and all of the documents that they wrote and all about the religious influence in those, and then move on to Western civilization as a whole?” he said. “It creates such a vacuum and such a hole that it’s really incredible that the court upheld this ban.”

Cortman believes this case could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the high court has already stated that using the Bible in classrooms for historical purposes is acceptable and constitutional.