You've got to hand it to Missouri's South Iron R-1 School District, which managed to hold on to a 30-year practice of Bible distribution to fifth graders long after Establishment Clause challenges would have cowed less committed violators. Against the advice of their own attorneys, insurer's attorneys and the superintendent himself – who seems to have resigned in frustration – the School Board maintained a commitment to putting Christian Bibles in the hands of young students. In one renowned maneuver, after receiving official advice to abandon the unconstitutional practice, the Board continued by voting to "pretend this meeting never happened".
Finally, reasonable church-state jurisprudence caught up, and yesterday a unanimous panel of the 8th Circuit affirmed a district court's permanent injunction disallowing the distribution of Bibles on school grounds during the school day, rejecting the school district's contention that a new "public forum" policy rendered the issue moot. From the 12-page decision written by Chief Judge James Loken:
The First Amendment limits the government’s authority to impose content related restrictions on private speakers in a public forum. “However, there is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.” The permanent injunction is based on a judicial determination that the District has for decades impermissibly endorsed a particular religion by allowing the distribution of Bibles in fifth grade classrooms.
The panel did overturn the district court's "declaratory judgment" that the creation of a new policy was also unconstitutional, since – short of handing out Bibles during the school day, which the injunction prohibits – there may be constitutional ways to implement that more general distribution policy. In an impressive feat of bizarro coverage, World Net Daily uses this fact to justify the headline, "Bible banishment by court overturned" in describing the 8th Circuit decision.
