First Liberty Institute announced today that the West Ward (MI) Elementary students whose songs were nearly censored for their religious content will now be allowed to sing in the school talent show.
Today, at a White House ceremony celebrating the National Day of Prayer, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the President’s Religious Liberty Commission, and appointed Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel to First Liberty as a member of the Commission.
Late yesterday, First Liberty Institute sent a letter to officials at West Ward Elementary School in Michigan urging that they allow two elementary school students to sing popular songs by Brandon Lake and Colton Dixon at an upcoming school talent show. School officials told the students just two days before auditions that allowing the second-grader’s song was a problem because it had “very clear language about worshipping God,” and that the issue with the fifth-grader’s song was that “not everyone believes in God.”
Today, First Liberty Institute and attorneys from Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, LLP, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, LLP, and Spengler Nathanson presented argument in the Sixth District Court of Appeals of Ohio asking the court to reverse a lower court’s decision that would allow the City of Bryan to stop Dad’s Place’s efforts to serve people with desperate needs.
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument in St. Isidore v. Drummond, a case involving the constitutionality of the Oklahoma Charter School Board’s approval of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School for inclusion as a charter-school. First Liberty Institute represents Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, the State Board of Education, and the State Department of Education.
First Liberty Institute and the law firm Mayer Brown LLP sent a letter to the Wasatch County (UT) School District demanding first grade teacher Taryn Israelson be allowed to post a voluntary prayer support chain in the school’s faculty lounge. After she received approval from the Human Resources manager for the prayer chain, the principal at J.R. Smith Elementary told her it must be removed.