Alan Borovoy
General Counsel
Canadian Civil Liberties Association
February 12, 2009
The position that many of us took, Canadian Civil Liberties Association among others, is that it is not the place of a public tax supported institution that requires the presence of people from all faiths, it's not the place of such an institution to promote a belief in any faith. That was from our point of view a violation of what public schools should be about. They should be open to all, of course they were, not only open to all but it was mandatory for people to send their kids to the public schools unless they sent them to some other approved school system, and uh that made from our point of view it was these kids were not fair game to be indoctrinated in a faith that was not mandated by their families. But they did it, and they did it for years, and we thought that was both a violation of freedom of religion and a violation of religious equality. I say freedom of religion because it puts the families of dissenters in a very uncomfortable position. They choose either to subject their kids to a faith that they don't approve or subject their kids to the conspicuousness of withdrawal from the classroom on religious grounds. Now our argument was that you don't enjoy an effective freedom of religion when you have to pay that kind of penalty for your separate faith.
If they want to have a few moments every day of some kind of exposure to inspirational messages whether those messages come from religious secular or other sources, I don't think there can be any objection to that as long as the school is not promoting a particular theology one against the other, or one in preference to other. If they are, if they want to draw some inspiration from a Christian teacher, a Jewish teacher, or a great secular prophet of one kind of another, I don't think there can be any objection to that. They might use Abraham Lincoln, even Barack Obama. That's, that's perfectly appropriate as, because that doesn't become the promotion of religious faith.
