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Maryland county school district spotlighted again with alleged bias

Attorneys with a conservative First Amendment public interest law firm have sent an informational letter to school board officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, in response to an accusation of viewpoint discrimination in treatment of informational literature from a religious organization.

Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney David Cortman says the ministry group PFOX -- Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays -- recently attempted to place a flyer in the community bulletin board system facilitated by the school district. Many different types of groups are permitted to post literature to that bulletin board system. According to observers, however, some district employees objected to PFOX's material.

Among those allegedly objecting, says Cortman, were district employees at Winston Churchill High School. "When they opposed a particular point of view regarding homosexual behavior, they actually encouraged students to throw out these flyers in the trash [and] took trash cans, put PFOX's name on top of them, and stood next to the trash cans encouraging students to dispose of these flyers," he notes.

Cortman says the problem is Montgomery County Schools allows groups advocating homosexual behavior, an opposing point of view to PFOX, to post literature without opposition. "As a matter of fact [the district] promotes it themselves in some of the new curriculum that they have," he adds. "But when another point of view -- a biblical point of view -- comes across, they necessarily are hostile to it."

So the district, says the ADF attorney, has violated a ruling made at least twice in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which has jurisdiction in Maryland. That court, he explains, has established the unconstitutionality of viewpoint discrimination in the school district.