Robert King

The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for a bill that enumerates an assortment of protections against religious discrimination — even as most are already covered because of the First Amendment, federal law and various court cases.

Indiana House Bill 1024, which Gov. Eric Holcomb said Tuesday that he will sign, allows:

• Public schools to teach survey courses on world religions

• Kids to pray in school and express their views on God in schoolwork.

• Students allows students to wear clothing or jewelry with religious symbols if similar secular apparel is allowed.

• Religious student groups to use school facilities.

And it states that students may not be discriminated against based on their religion.

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Plainfield High School, about 15 miles southwest of Indianapolis in Plainfield, Ind., has a Fellowship of Christian Athletes and a Muslim Student Association. It gives students a moment of silence to start the day, and it’s not unheard of for members of its sports teams — the Quakers – to take a knee and pray after a game.

Religion is woven into the daily life of the school in such a way that when Principal Mel Siefert is asked about a bill to protect students from religious discrimination, he seems puzzled.

“I guess I just take it for granted that this is a diverse community,” he said.

Students in public schools already are granted most of the provisions in the bill, said Tim McRoberts, associate director of the Indiana Association of School Principals.

“The bill that remains just kind of codifies those rights that kids already have,” he said.

A 1962 Supreme Court ruling requires public schools to permit only voluntary, silent and nondisruptive prayer — the genesis of at least 34 states' creation of one minute of silence at the beginning of a school day.

State Rep. John Bartlett, an Indianapolis Democrat, said he conceived his bill as a way to bring the hope of God to the young people he meets in his district, which covers an area that he admits “has a high number of murders.”

At 68, Bartlett is old enough to remember an era when public-school teachers would lead students in prayer and excuse them from classes for weekly religious education courses. He said it was his intention with the bill to introduce children to a higher power.

“My intent was to give our children an opportunity to pray, not make it mandatory,” he said.

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The bill gained enthusiastic support from many Democrats and members of the Republican supermajority. Some, including Bartlett, cast it as a way to clear up any confusion that school leaders have about what religious expression is allowed and to relieve them of fear of lawsuits.

Three years ago, Tennessee enacted its own Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act in April 2014; North Carolina followed with its own law protecting students' rights to prayer and other religious activity in June 2014.

This year,Kentucky passed Senate Bill 17 in March, which permits students to express religious or political viewpoints in school assignments, among other provisions. Florida's SB 436 passed both houses earlier this month but is in conference committee because of some state House amendments.

Even though education leaders in Indiana say they have little confusion about student rights, supporters of Bartlett’s bill pointed to a controversy that arose late last year at Carmel High School, about 15 miles north of Indianapolis in Carmel, Ind., where the school took down an anti-abortion group’s poster that promoted adoption over abortion. School officials said the banner was removed because it violated rules about what needs to be displayed on club signs, not because of a philosophical dispute about abortion.

Teens for Life obtained legal help from the Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based Christian advocacy group, which threatened to sue. Rather than litigate, Carmel High agreed to allow the poster to be temporarily displayed. Still, the case was a rallying cry for the legislation.

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Liberty Counsel’s Roger Gannam said HB 1024 “serves a teaching function in showing school administrators that these things are protected under the law.”

Ryan McCann, director of operations and public policy at the Indiana Family Institute, also pointed to the Carmel case as a cautionary tale.

“We’d hope that all schools are protecting the First Amendment rights of all students, but we just know, unfortunately, that that’s not always the case,” he said.

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Still, leaders at more than these two schools say students' religious rights are understood and respected.

Students have before- and after-school club meetings for groups with names such as Teens for Christ. At many schools, students have annual prayer gatherings around the flagpoles.

Many schools allow youth group leaders to visit students at lunch. And when a tragedy hits a school, clergy are invariably a part of crisis-response teams.

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In rarer instances, students may be allotted a room to pray or a place to go during lunch while they are observing a religious fast. In Plainfield, where Muslims are a sizable part of the student population, the high school has made rooms available for their daily prayers.

Even with those kinds of allowances for faith at school, education groups opposed Bartlett’s bill when it was proposed, largely because it called for schools to create limited public forums.

Some school administrators feared that graduation ceremonies would turn into a marathon of prayers from groups across the faith spectrum who would have required equal time. Or, conversely, they feared it would have required people to shuffle in and out when prayers were uttered contrary to their beliefs.

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“If it was taken literally, the word I heard was that it would be the Wild West of religious pontificating,” said Principal Al Remaly of Clinton Central Junior-Senior High School in Michigantown, Ind., about 45 miles northwest of Indianapolis.

Eventually, the public forum portion was dropped, and with it most of the opposition went silent. But after that — and other changes — HB 1024 doesn’t appear to do anything that isn’t already covered elsewhere in the law or court decisions, said Jane Henegar, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.

“There was a statement legislators wanted to make,” Henegar said. “I guess the question now, in its final form, is does it make the statement they wanted it to make?”

Follow Robert King on Twitter: @RbtKing