Follow-Up: High School Graduation To Be Held In A Church

Here is a follow-up to my blog entry about the graduation…

Americans United and ACLU File Lawsuit Over Public School Graduations at Church

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU of Connecticut and the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit in federal court charging that the Enfield (Conn.) Public Schools’ decision to hold their high school graduation ceremonies at a Christian church unconstitutionally imposes religion on students.

The groups are bringing the legal action on behalf of two Enfield High School seniors and three of their parents. The lawsuit asserts that holding commencement at First Cathedral, a Bloomfield church replete with religious signs and symbols, violates the separation of church and state and the religious liberty rights of students.

The complaint points out that there are many secular facilities in the area that the Enfield Schools could use, including a number that compare favorably to the Cathedral in terms of cost, size and distance from Enfield.
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Americans United and the ACLU have engaged in lengthy correspondence with Enfield Schools officials about this matter, seeking to resolve the issue outside of court. Officials at four other Connecticut schools agreed to stop using First Cathedral for graduation. Members of the Enfield Board of Education at first agreed to not use the church. But on April 13, they changed their minds, after being heavily lobbied by a right-wing religious organization.

As I said before, holding the graduation ceremony there would force some students who religious values do not allow them to enter another faith’s house of worship to not attend their high school graduation and not to walk across the stage to be handed their diploma before their family and friends.

Also according to one comment in the article in the Hartford Courant the Chair of the Enfield Board of Education is “an evangelical Christian minister who has publicly stated that he puts his faith above the concerns of others.”

On the Family Institute of Connecticut blog site they said, “We [FIC] contacted the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Archbishop LeRoy Bailey and BOE Chairman Greg Stokes. It was FIC’s involvement that brought these three parties into contact with each other for the first time.”

It is hypocritical of the FIC to force students to choose between their religion and high school graduation, when on the web-site they say, “At the Family Institute, our mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society and to promote sound, ethical and moral values in our culture and government.” How are they strengthen the family as the foundation of society when the child is forced to choose between their religion beliefs or to graduation with their high school classmates.