This is for the Donny Most files. A quick synopsis for those who don't want to read the whole thing. A 16 year old girl is the plaintiff in a case to sue a RI high school to remove a prayer banner from her high school. This banner had been put there in 1963 as a gift of a class to the school shortly after the USSC ruling that banned prayer in school. Since then she has gotten a lot of threats from the local community and some florists have even refused to deliver her flowers sent by the ACLU out of fear. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46160046/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/#.TyK5moFjHDE Atheist teen forces school to remove prayer from wall after 49 years State Representative calls girl, who has been escorted by police to school, 'an evil little thing' CRANSTON, R.I. — She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years. A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion. State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights. “I was amazed,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and has given Jessica $13,000 from support and scholarship funds. “We haven’t seen a case like this in a long time, with this level of revilement and ostracism and stigmatizing.” Written by seventh grader The prayer, eight feet tall, is papered onto the wall in the Cranston West auditorium, near the stage. It has hung there since 1963, when a seventh grader wrote it as a sort of moral guide and that year’s graduating class presented it as a gift. It was a year after a landmark Supreme Court ruling barring organized prayer in public schools. “Our Heavenly Father,” the prayer begins, “grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful.” It goes on for a few more lines before concluding with “Amen.” For Jessica, who was baptized in the Catholic Church but said she stopped believing in God at age 10, the prayer was an affront. “It seemed like it was saying, every time I saw it, ‘You don’t belong here,’ ” she said the other night during an interview at a Starbucks here. Since the ruling, the prayer has been covered with a tarp. The school board has indicated it will announce a decision on an appeal next month. A friend brought the prayer to Jessica’s attention in 2010, when she was a high school freshman. She said nothing at first, but before long someone else — a parent who remained anonymous — filed a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union. That led the Cranston school board to hold hearings on whether to remove the prayer, and Jessica spoke at all of them. She also started a Facebook page calling for the prayer’s removal (it now has almost 4,000 members) and began researching Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious freedom. 'Religious revival' Last March, at a rancorous meeting that Judge Ronald R. Lagueux of United States District Court in Providence described in his ruling as resembling “a religious revival,” the school board voted 4-3 to keep the prayer. Some members said it was an important piece of the school’s history; others said it reflected secular values they held dear. The Rhode Island chapter of the A.C.L.U. then asked Jessica if she would serve as a plaintiff in a lawsuit; it was filed the next month. New England is not the sort of place where battles over the division of church and state tend to crop up. It is the least religious region of the country, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. But Rhode Island is an exception: it is the nation’s most Catholic state, and dust-ups over religion are not infrequent. Just last month, several hundred people protested at the Statehouse after Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, lighted what he called a “holiday tree.” In Cranston, the police said they would investigate some of the threatening comments posted on Twitter against Jessica, some of which came from students at the high school. Pat McAssey, a senior who is president of the student council, said the threats were “completely inexcusable” but added that Jessica had upset some of her classmates by mocking religion online. “Their frustration kind of came from that,” he said. Many alumni this week said they did not remember the prayer from their high school days but felt an attachment to it nonetheless. “I am more of a constitutionalist but find myself strangely on the other side of this,” said Donald Fox, a 1985 graduate of Cranston West. “The prayer banner espouses nothing more than those values which we all hope for our children, no matter what school they attend or which religious background they hail from.” 'Strong' Brittany Lanni, who graduated from Cranston West in 2009, said that no one had ever been forced to recite the prayer and called Jessica “an idiot.” “If you don’t believe in that,” she said, “take all the money out of your pocket, because every dollar bill says, ‘In God We Trust.’” Raymond Santilli, whose family owns one of the flower shops that refused to deliver to Jessica, said he declined for safety reasons, knowing the controversy around the case. People from around the world have called to support or attack his decision, which he said he stood by. But of Jessica, he said, “I’ve got a daughter, and I hope my daughter is as strong as she is, O.K.?” Jessica said she had stopped believing in God when she was in elementary school and her mother fell ill for a time. “I had always been told that if you pray, God will always be there when you need him,” she said. “And it didn’t happen for me, and I doubted it had happened for anybody else. So yeah, I think that was just like the last step, and after that I just really didn’t believe any of it.” Does she empathize in any way with members of her community who want the prayer to stay? “I’ve never been asked this before,” she said. A pause, and then: “It’s almost like making a child get a shot even though they don’t want to. It’s for their own good. I feel like they might see it as a very negative thing right now, but I’m defending their Constitution, too.”
Been following this for a while. It's encouraging that a young girl has the bravery, conviction, and wherewithal to stand up for what is right. However, it's equally discouraging that so many people, including people in places of power and influence, don't. Or worse yet, have treated her like s**t because of it. Seen this story about a thousand times, and I'm sure we'll see it a thousand more.
Brave kid. I'm against school representing/promoting any religion or religion itself. Religion is important to me but keep it private.
Having the school follow the Constitution's tenet of separation of church and state makes her evil? So you feel the Constitution is evil? We got a communist here, people! Esteban is a communist! A modern day terrorist! I think he needs to be indefinitely detained per the NDAA.
I don't know why she made a big deal out of this, I really don't see the point of making a fuss something like this in high school.
Conservative Christian logic says that if Christianity and Christians are good, then non-Christians (with the exception of the Jews) must be evil. Many believe religion is necessary for morality and than athiests and agnostics have no morals.
Yeah, you have to wonder if at 16 she could realize how this would affect her and her family. So sure of something so intangible at such a young age. I won't go into the whole '16 and an outspoken atheist?' questions/debate. I'm just curious... should it have taken an outspoken 16 year old for this to happen? Why is she bearing the brunt? You'd think the people in charge would have agreed, if under disagreement, that it wasn't appropriate in this day and age, at least without a federal court intervening. And perhaps this isn't really popular or appropriate here, but... at the risk of being dressed down for asking... Why does she care, really? If you don't believe in it, why would you care if it's on the wall (on a personal level)? I get the constitutional issue and letter of the law etc. but isn't the gist of the idea that these things aren't acceptable because it would offend people of other religions? I understand concerns of persecution, etc, but I don't really see how it should overly bother someone who doesn't believe in it at all to the extent that they would lead a solo fight all the way to federal court. Of course, I would think the school's consensus should have been that it wasn't constitutionally acceptable there. You would think that a simple letter or two would have been enough. You would think it wouldn't have taken a Federal Judge to remove it. I do have to assume lesser avenues were tried, and good on her for following through, I guess. All that said, I can't imagine why it would bother her so much, or why there would be such consternation at her demand. I suppose that it does uncover the extremism that exists around her (really, won't send her flowers?), but really, I don't know why it would be worth it to put your name on pursuing something like this if you're in her shoes. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, at all, just amazed at the whole thing, really, on both sides.
No. It's not about being offended (on a personal level, as in, I don't agree with the message or concept). It's about equal treatment under the law and not having the state sponsor or support a religion. State sponsorship of religion threatens ALL of us. Freedom of... and freedom from. You can't be selective when enforcing these rules.
yeah, that's the obvious part. The part I'm talking about is... cmon... really? That, and moreso, why they didn't just say "Yeah, you're right".
All they have to do is take out 'heavenly father' and 'amen' and they have a nice little motto, affirmation, or whatever you want to call it.
The backlash she received from her follow christian students was in no way surprising. But from the adults? I shouldn't be surprised, but they still manage to shock me with their moral disconnect. (I am at a failure to come up with a better term this morning. me fail English, that's umpossible) American Taliban