Judge Throws Out Atheists’ Lawsuit Over WV School’s Bible Indoctrination Class

By Hemant Mehta

A few months ago, I posted about how the Freedom From Religion Foundation had sued the Mercer County Schools in West Virginia over an “elective” Bible class that had been offered for more than 75 years to students in elementary and middle school.

There’s a reason “elective” deserves to be in quotation marks. It wasn’t really optional. Students who didn’t take the class were bullied by their peers, and there were multiple indications that the District’s administration and staff wanted students to take the class. For example, they didn’t offer any alternative classes during the time the Bible was being taught.

In the case of one parent whose daughter didn’t take the class, the girl sat in the library reading a Harry Potter book, only to have a student come up to her and say, “You need to be reading the Bible.”

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