The Murrays originally lost in state courts and on appeal.
#Abington township free
The suit said the rule transgressed the Establishment Clause by requiring compulsory religious education and violated the Free Exercise Clause by discriminating against atheists. An attorney herself, Murray brought the suit only after protesting to officials, stirring up media attention, and encouraging her son to protest in a controversial strike that kept him out of school for 18 days. They had challenged a 1905 Baltimore school board rule requiring each school day to start with Bible reading or the Lord's Prayer ("Our father, who art in heaven …"), or both.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her 14-year-old son, William Murray, were atheists.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Schempp along with Murray as a consolidated case. Local and state officials immediately appealed to the U.S. The three-judge panel ruled that the Bible reading statute violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …") and interfered with its Free Exercise Clause ("or prohibiting the free exercise "). … I do not want my children believing that God is a lesser person than a human father." Although hardly the first lawsuit on this issue-Bible reading cases in state courts had yielded contradictory rulings since 1910- Schempp was the first to reach a federal court. Leviticus, in particular, upset him, "where they mention all sorts of blood sacrifices, uncleanness and leprosy. Schempp, testified that he objected to parts of the Bible. In 1958, a special three-judge federal court heard the case. The Pennsylvania law was challenged by the Schempps, whose three children also attended Unitarian Sunday school. Teachers could be fired for refusing to participate, and pupils occasionally were segregated from others if they did not join in the daily reading. Teachers ordered students to rise and recite the verses reverently and in unison, or, as in the Abington School District, students in a broadcasting class read the verses over a public-address system. But local school officials only bought the Protestant King James Version. The law did not specify which version of the Bible should be used-for instance, it could be the Catholic Douay text or the Jewish version of the Old Testament. The Schempp case concerned a 1949 Pennsylvania law that forced public schools to start each day with a reading of ten Bible verses (24 Pa. The Schempp ruling involved two cases: its namesake and Murray v. This time, the majority went one step further, issuing the first concrete test for determining violations of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Schempp was in many ways a repeat of Engel: the religious practices with which it was concerned were nominally different, but the logic used to find them unconstitutional was the same. Engel had opened the floodgates Schempp ensured that a steady flow of anti-school prayer rulings would continue into the future. vitale, a state-authored prayer that was recited by public school students each morning (370 U.S. The decision came one year after the Court had struck down, in engel v. Supreme Court banned the Lord's Prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Abington School District v.