California Teacher Suing School District Over Religious Discrimination
by Jim Brown
May 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - A California school district will be put on trial after allegedly targeting an elementary school teacher for discrimination because of his Christian beliefs. Judge James Ware has refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by elementary school teacher Stephen Williams against the Cupertino School District.
Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek Elementary School, claims his rights were violated when the district recently barred him from handing out documents relating to American history because they contained references to God and religion. The instructor had wanted to provide students with supplemental readings such as William Penn's Frame of Government and excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.
The court's order in the case, Stephen J. Williams v. Patricia Vidmar, et al., by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted the Cupertino School District's motion to dismiss in part, but also denied it in part. In his ruling, Judge Ware noted that the teacher had "sufficiently alleged the deprivation of a constitutional right to Equal Protection of the law."
Representing Williams is the Alliance Defense Fund's Josh Carden, who contends that his client is the victim of religious discrimination. Although many people may have seen the school district in the media, "making a big deal of the fact that the Declaration of Independence is hanging in the library and that sort of thing," the lawyer says, "that is not the issue."
The real issue in this case, Carden maintains, "is that the school district has put a restriction on Stephen Williams that is unlike any other restriction on any other teacher. And they have told him expressly, 'You, Stephen Williams, may not hand out a document if it has any Christian or religious reference in it at all.'"
According to the ADF attorney, barring the school teacher from handing out the history-related materials was an egregious abridgement of the Christian teacher's equal protection rights. "These are not outrageous, controversial documents," Carden insists. "These were documents central to the founding of our nation." Nevertheless, he believes the school district apparently found cause to ban Williams specifically from distributing the documents, based on his personal religious beliefs.
"The only reason Stephen seems to have been singled out is the fact that he's a Christian," the teacher's legal counsel asserts. "And somehow, the district must reason that when he hands out William Penn's Frame of Government, the fact that his Christian hands have touched it turns it into a gospel tract. And that's just an outrageous thing for the district to do."
Carden says Williams has the constitutional right to be treated the same as other teachers in the Cupertino School District. Judge Ware, who ruled in April that the Christian teacher can move forward with his discrimination suit against the district, has set an October trial date for that proceeding.
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