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School board reinstates student suspended for saying "God bless"
The top story in St. Louis today is that James Lord has been reinstated as the closed-circuit television reader of the daily bulletin at Dupo High School in nearby Dupo, Illinois. Lord's crime? Signing off his December 17 broadcast with "Have a safe and happy holiday, and God bless."

"The purpose of the [morning broadcast] is to read the daily bulletin," Principal Jonathan Heerboth had explained to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "We can't allow one person to use school time to express any personal religious beliefs … we're not going to turn loose our school forum."

School superintendent Michael Koebel agreed, saying Lord had no right to utter such a statement. "If you go off school grounds you're certainly welcome to use your First Amendment rights and stand on a box and say anything you'd like," he told television station KSDK (which has video of the initial broadcast and last night's board meeting).

After his suspension, which was set to end Sunday, Lord issued a news release, distributed more than 400 flyers asking community members to attend a school board meeting, and hired lawyers with the American Center for Law and Justice to plead his case. The case attracted national media attention.

ACLJ lawyer Francis Manion says the case wasn't really a matter of religious freedom. Saying "God bless" is "simply like saying Gesundheit," he said. "I mean it is not necessarily a religious statement."

Last night, the school board reinstated Lord to the "Tiger's Eye News."

"School Board President Brian Thompson said Lord has agreed to not make 'God bless' a staple of the show, but that the School Board doesn't have a problem with an occasional 'God bless' over the air," reports The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"I'm satisfied," Lord told the paper. "It shouldn't have been a big deal in the first place. I was kind of tired of dealing with all this, but I'm not doing it just for me, I'm doing it for everyone else."

Religion and politics:

• Knowing what candidates believe | Do you vote with a candidate's religious beliefs in mind, including how you think a candidate will approach others' beliefs? Religious leaders respond (Daily Pilot, Calif.)
  
  
• The politics of prayer | As Democrats abandon traditional values and religion, their core voters are slipping away (Tony Quinn, Los Angeles Times)
  
  
• The highest precinct | I expected the God Factor to appear in the presidential election, but I didn't expect it to arrive this early (Art Buchwald, The Washington Post)
  
  
• Guns, God, and gays | Where did Dean get this surefire attention-getter? (William Safire, The New York Times Magazine)
  
  
• How will Dean's faith inform his judgment? | As a member of the UCC, Dean is not instructed what to think by a pope, bishops, or his own pastor, for we do not grant that power to anyone. (Nancy S. Taylor, The Boston Globe)
  
  
• Mugabe faces the wrath of God, warns Archbishop Pius Ncube | Archbishop Pius Ncube has revealed that in the early 1980s, he was very close to President Robert Mugabe, the man he now castigates and calls a "big African crook" (Zimbabwe Standard)
  
  
• Pope gives Cheney peace message | US Vice-President Dick Cheney has visited Pope John Paul II as part of a European tour seen as an attempt to mend fences after the Iraq war (BBC)
  
  

Secularism in France:

• Chrirac faces opposition over scarf ban | Even some of his ideological allies have begun to express doubts about whether such a law would be workable and what might be the price. (Associated Press)
  
  

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48