High School Girls Save First Amendment

A pair of high school girls has done something Republican members of Congress only talk about: They saved the First Amendment by actually using it.

“In July 2014—the summer before her senior year—Samantha Jones’s father told her family the American Humanist Association (AHA) was suing the Matawan-Aberdeen (N. J.) School Board on behalf of an anonymous atheist family,” Paula Parker reports in the August 2015 issue of Citizen magazine. “They claimed reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in schools was unconstitutional and discriminatory because it includes the phrase ‘Under God.’”

Citizen is published by Focus on the Family. The Jones family joined the American Legion and the Knights of Columbus in fighting the lawsuit and won.

Meanwhile, “While Jones’s case was making its way through the courts, Madison Sutherland was fighting for the right to start a pro-life club at Courtland High School in Spotsylvania, Va.,” Parker writes. “In June 2014, she learned about Students for Life of America (SFLA) from a friend who’d started a chapter at a different school, and was eager to do the same.”

Perhaps not too surprisingly, school authorities dragged their feet on approving her request, even, at one point, rejecting it, until she got a lawyer, from the Thomas More Society. Then, school administrators, perhaps grudgingly, granted her request.

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