2009 In Review, Part 2

The year 2009 had its share of stories covering the legal battles between the boundaries of religion and government. A number of lawsuits were filed and resolved, and many of them were significant to people who follow the matter of religious freedom in the news.

A Sikh woman sued her employer, the Internal Revenue Service, for discrimination after she was prohibited from wearing her ceremonial kirpan at work. Google faced a lawsuit filed by a former employee who claimed not only religious but sexual harassment, and Bath and Body Works was the target of discrimination charges when a Wiccan employee was fired by a manager who disapproved of her religious beliefs.

School districts seemed to be popular when it came to religious freedom legal action this year. In Vermont, a district was sued when middle school teacher Wally Rogers handed out pamphlets about Why Jesus Is Better Than Santa. A Kentucky high school faced complaints when a group of football players on a field trip got baptized, and the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in when Tennessee kids were being preached at in class. See You At the Pole continued to be controversial, and one school district decided to solve the church/state problem by giving religious signs their very own special place at football games. Ohio’s John Freshwater made headlines again when he sued the school board for discrimination – this was the school board that fired him for burning a student, and decades of proselytizing in class.

Several of 2009’s prominent cases related to prayer and religion crossing the line into the realm of government. Florida decided it would be nice to offer a religious specialty license plate with “I Believe” on it, and South Carolina played along too. In SC, the plate was stopped by a court injunction, but private parties may still be able to get it if they fund the production themselves. Zoning changes effected psychics and soothsayers in Illinois and St. Petersburg, Florida. On the opposite side of the coin, a Christian evangelist claimed he was being unfairly persecuted when he tried to spread the word of god.

In our next recap post, we’ll look at some of the year’s stories about how people view religion and religious freedoms.

2009 In Review, Part 2 originally appeared on About.com Paganism / Wiccan on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 15:27:55.

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