16 year-old wins legal battle to vindicate her constitutional rights, but continues to face retaliatory harassment

In July 2010, 16-year old Jessica Ahlquist—who identifies as an atheist—informed her local ACLU chapter  that a mural addressed to “Our Heavenly Father” was displayed in her school auditorium, which made her feel “ostracized and out of place”.  In 1963-64, after the Supreme Court had invalidated the practice of school prayer in public schools in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), the Class of 1963 had presented a gift of two murals to the School, one depicting the school creed and the other the School Prayer, to decorate the walls of the new auditorium.  Although the plans for the murals had been approved by the school administration at every phase, all the expenses of creating the murals were paid through fund-raising undertaken by the Class of 1963.

Ahlquist and the ACLU eventually filed suit demanding that the City of Cranston, Rhode Island, and its School Committee “remove or alter” the Prayer Mural.  The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated against the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibits any law respecting the “establishment” of religion.

In January 2012,  U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux ruled in Ahlquist’s favor in a 40-page “slam dunk opinion”.  The Defendants had disputed Ahlquist’s standing to bring the suit, claiming that she must demonstrate a real and actual injury-in-fact in order to establish proper standing; a mere philosophical or political disagreement would thus be insufficient.  Judge Lagueux rejected the claim, pointing out that under current Supreme Court precedent, Ahlquist’s status as a student enrolled at Cranston West would suffice to confer standing in a dispute pertaining to a prayer displayed in the school.  Ahlquist formed part of a “captive audience” routinely subjected to the mural’s religious message.

Regarding the substantive aspect of whether the display infringed the restrictions inherent in the Establishment Clause, Judge Lagueux applied the test enunciated by the Supreme Court in  Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971).  In order to survive an Establishment Clause challenge,  a governmental practice, or legislative act,  must: “(1) reflect a clearly secular purpose; (2) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion; and (3) it must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion.”  A review of the 50-year history of the display established that it had a purely religious purpose. As Judge Laguex put it, “no amount of debate can make the School Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that.”  As regards the second prong in the Lemon test,  the Prayer Mural indubitably espoused important moral values, yet it did so “in the context of religious supplication”.  Finally, the Mural had resulted in impermissible entanglement between the School Committee and religion, in the sense that a significantly lopsided majority of the Committee’s members had spoken repeatedly and passionately, in religious terms, in favor of retaining the Prayer Mural.  Judge Lagueux also found that the display was an unconstitutional “endorsement” of religion and also amounted to coercive pressure, however subtle, given the context and impressionable age of high-school students.

More worrisome than even the actual violation has perhaps been the vitriolic and distasteful allegations leveled at the teenager ever since she began her quest to enforce her constitutional rights to be free from such governmental endorsement of religion.  State Representative Peter Polombo recently called Ahlquist “an evil little thing,” a “clapping seal” and a “pawn star” on a talk radio show.  She has also reportedly received threats of physical harm, and has been the subject of deplorable vitriolic outbursts in the blogosphere and on social networking sites.