The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) reports that attorneys have secured a settlement with a Missouri school district that will allow pro-life students to display posters and fliers with a life-affirming message. According to OneNewsNow, the client in the case was a student at Dixon High School, who was told she could not hang posters for the Pro-Life Day of Silent Solidarity. Matt Sharp, litigation counsel with the ADF, told OneNewsNow that “the law was very clear that the school has to treat all student speech equally. It can’t discriminate against student speech based upon its religious viewpoint or its pro-life viewpoint, and that is what the school was doing here.”
According to an Alliance Defense Fund press release from June 13, the school was allowing students to hang material that ADF Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco says included “a variety of non-curricular material such as photographs of students looking like zombies; announcements promoting the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network’s Day of Silence; and posters with political and anti-drug messages.”
The school district reversed its decision after the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit. The district has agreed to let students post religious and pro-life material along with other material in the areas designated by school officials. Matt Sharp noted, “Public school officials cannot pick and choose what messages they are going to allow based on which viewpoints they prefer. The new policy revisions ensure that this type of unconstitutional discrimination will no longer occur.” After the school district reversed its policies, the ADF filed a voluntary dismissal of the case.
Sharp continued, “Although our client has now graduated and is going on, she secured the right of her fellow pro-life and Christian students to continue to promote these great events, to continue to allow their religious speech and religious flyers to get equal access at the school.”
You can learn more about the Alliance Defense Fund here.
