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Lawsuit Challenges NJ Schools' Christmas Music Ban

by Jim Brown
December 27, 2004

(AgapePress) - A New Jersey school system has been sued over its ban on traditional Christmas music. The Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a parent and his two children, challenging the Maplewood Public School District's prohibition of all religious music.

The lawsuit contends that the district's policy was implemented to prevent students and student groups from playing traditional Christmas music at school events during the 2004 holiday season. Maplewood school groups such as the Martin Luther King Gospel Choir and the Brass Ensemble have been banned from performing any traditional Christmas songs and carols, even if they are performed as an instrumental arrangement, entirely without words.

Thomas More Law Center President and Chief Counsel Richard Thompson calls the Maplewood policy "another example of the anti-Christmas, anti-religion policy" infecting America's public school system nationwide. He says the Constitution of the United States does not require government schools to become "religion-free zones," and he compares forcing students to strip religious content from their music to making them study art history while excluding the work of the Renaissance painters and sculptors, simply because they dealt with religious subjects.

Law Center attorney Rob Muise, who filed the suit, says the school district's ban is clearly unconstitutional. "What they've done," he explains, "is they have carved out of their curriculum an entire genre of music -- religious music -- which is very important culturally and part of our vast religious heritage. And it really doesn't make any educational sense."

Nor any legal sense, Muise asserts. He says when school officials target a particular genre on an improper basis, such as religion, they actually violate the constitution's Establishment Clause, rather than adhere to it. "But in this case also, because of the academic institution, they're also violating the First Amendment right to academic freedom of our clients," he adds.

The attorney says the New Jersey school district had apparently received one or more complaints from certain individuals about the inclusion of Christmas music in school events. But while the complaints may have compelled some kind of measured response from Maplewood school officials, he says instead, "rather than operating here with a scalpel, they've kind of taken out the sledgehammer and decided they're just going to excise all religious music whatsoever."

But in fact, Muise says, the initial complaints really gave no justification or basis for the all-out ban on traditional Christmas music, and "quite frankly," he says, "it ends up being, in many respects, a sham."

The federal civil rights suit the Law Center filed argues that the Maplewood Public School District's total prohibition of religious music conveys the impermissible, government-sponsored message of disapproval and hostility toward religion. The suit further maintains that because the religious music is banned from the public schools, students are denied the ability to learn about and listen to music that has influenced the social, cultural, and historic development of civilization.

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