School's 'Inclusive' Holiday Program Challenged for Excluding Christ
by Jim Brown
December 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - A Chicago attorney has urged a suburban school not to discriminate against people of faith during the Christmas season.
Spring Grove Elementary School recently staged a holiday program that celebrated Hanukkah and Kwanzaa but excluded references to Christ and the Christmas story. School officials claim the multicultural concert, which also included references to Santa, was designed to be more inclusive of all holiday traditions and cultures. But attorney Andy Norman with the Alliance Defense Fund says the school engaged in illegal discrimination against Christians.
"It's unfortunate that the phrase 'separation of church and state' is bandied about too often these days to mean ... you cannot have any expression of Jesus or prayer or evangelism or handing out Bible tracts, that kind of thing, in the public square -- and that's simply not true," Norman says.
According to the attorney, there is only one remedy for the political correctness displayed by Spring Grove Elementary. As he puts it: "know your rights ... talk about your rights ... use your rights ... and, if necessary, defend your rights." Such an approach, he says, is effective.
"[W]e're finding ... that when administrators are confronted with the fact that the Supreme Court disallows a religion of secularism or, like in [the case of] Spring Grove, favoring some religions and excluding others, that's illegal," he says. "And when the administrators find out about that, they tend to change. They back off."
Last month, Norman sent letters to about 350 school districts in the Chicago area, informing superintendents that legal precedents "allow and sometimes require officials to permit religious expression in public schools."
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