Oh My God! Religious Song Learned In Public School!

(bumped up and updated)

Are people who make these asinine complaints really and truly mortified, or do they just make these complaints because they can get people to give in to them and hence make them feel as if they have some small amount of power?

The parents of two third-graders have sued the St. Johns County School Board over a religious-themed song their teacher planned to have their class sing at an end-of-year program.

Teaching the song, “In God We Still Trust,” amounts to religious indoctrination and interferes with the parents’ right to raise their children according to their own beliefs, the lawsuit says.

The district’s superintendent pulled the song after receiving a complaint from a parent hours before the lawsuit was filed last week in federal court, a school district spokeswoman said.

But the parents’ lawyer said they are still entitled to damages because their children were required to learn the song. They are seeking to bar the school district from the “religious instruction” the song represents...

School Board attorney David Marsey said in his response to the lawsuit that the issue differs from the battle over school-sponsored prayer because public school choirs historically have been permitted to sing religious songs. Courts have held that a choral curriculum can be expected to include religious songs because a significant percentage of choral music is based on religious themes or texts, Marsey said.

“Simply, a public school ... does not endorse religion because its choir sings a Christian song,” Marsey said.

When did we get so weak, that causing (faux) offense is the worst offense? When did we become such pansies?

Update, 3/27/09: This seems eminently reasonable to me:

A federal judge has dismissed the claims of a parent who wanted to remove the words "under God" from the Texas pledge of allegiance recited each morning by public schoolchildren.

U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade ruled Thursday the state pledge may continue to reference God because the national pledge and four other states reference God or divine grace in their pledge, The Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

"A voluntary recitation of the Texas Pledge of Allegiance simply does not coerce students in the same way a school-sponsored prayer might," Kinkeade wrote in his opinion. (boldface mine--Darren)

I add that the constitutions of all 50 states reference some form of deity.

And should the decisions someday go the other way, and courts rule that deities cannot even be recognized or identified in school based on some faulty interpretation of the 1st Amendment, then we'll need to start renaming some cities, too. San Francisco (Saint Francis) and Los Angeles (the angels) should be first on the list.