‘I Was Told I Can’t…Pray Tonight’: High School Grad Fights Back After School Forces Her to Ax Prayer From Commencement Speech

By Billy Hallowell - Faithwire

June 19, 2017

graduation speech Moriah Bridges right to pray. commencement speech

Jeremy Dys, First Liberty Deputy General Counsel: “School districts need to remember that students retain their religious liberty as they walk through the schoolhouse gates and all the way through the graduation ceremony.”

A conservative legal firm is accusing a Pennsylvania school district of “forcing a student to alter her personal graduation remarks to remove any religious viewpoint” — something that the First Liberty Institute said is a violation of the Constitution. The law firm sent a letter to Beaver Area School District in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, detailing purported grievances over a recent commencement speech by a graduate named Moriah Bridges.

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When our Nation’s Founding Fathers wrote the Establishment Clause into the Bill of Rights, they envisioned it as a protective device – a means of safeguarding citizens from a federally-mandated religion. In just over two hundred years, it has instead become a weapon often wielded by government bureaucrats to stamp out any vestige of religion from our public life. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito even warned that religious liberty is “fast becoming a disfavored right.”

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