Prayer for Relief
August 15th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
The bill’s been in effect for a while, but Rick Perry ceremonially signed into law HB 3678, the so-called “Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act,” in Sugar Land yesterday. The governor’s press release contained this nugget: “The bill, authored by Rep. Charlie Howard, does not expand religious expression in schools, but rather reiterates a student’s existing right to expression.”
So … it’s redundant with existing law? Pretty much. The final version of the bill doesn’t do anything really except lay out step-by-step, Supreme Court-friendly instructions for folks who want to slip benedictions into morning announcements and football games. That’s not how it was intended, though, asthe Observer reported back in June. All the messy details after the jump.
The bill was supposed to cut down on messy First Amendment lawsuits against school districts by clearly distinguishing parameters for religious speech in public schools. So why was the bill written by a lawyer who makes a living suing school districts for curtailing students’ religious expression? The Observer’s legislative wrap-up issue explains:
One part of the proposed law that didn’t make it into the final draft speaks more eloquently to the bill’s true intent. The bill, it turns out, was drafted by private lawyers with a penchant for suing school districts, and may not only make lawsuits more likely, but stick taxpayers with even more legal fees.
In its first version on the Senate side, the bill contained language making it easier for schools to be sued by students claiming districts violated the law. School districts would have been required to pay the students’ attorney fees if the lawsuits were successful.
Even the bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Tommy Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, was uncomfortable with the enforcement language and removed it. Why was it there in the first place?
Williams says it was written by Kelly Coghlan, chief counsel at Coghlan and Associates. Both Coghlan and ally Kelly Shackelford, president of the Free Market Foundation and chief counsel at Liberty Legal Institute, have worked on lawsuits against schools for allegedly stifling religious expression.
…When the Observer asked Coghlan who had written the provision, he repeatedly said, “It’s irrelevant who wrote that,” because the language had been stripped. He then abruptly hung up the phone.
But even with the language stripped, Doug Laycock, a con-law professor at Michigan, thinks the bill is setting districts up for when the suits come marching in. “It’s a very cleverly drafted attempt to get prayer at the beginning of the school day and at the beginning of school events within the confines of Supreme Court existing law,” he told the Observer.
According to Laycock, students can still sue schools for damages for violating their First Amendment rights, and they can still have attorney fees paid by school boards at the discretion of the judge, under the Texas Declaratory Judgment Act.
“They obviously went to great lengths to set this up,” Laycock said. “Schools will get sued.”
