“Infidel” Parents Sue Palo Alto Over Preferential Treatment of Islam By Som Misha

Source : In Palo Alto, Jewish, Hindu, and Zoroastrian families are suing over a mosque visit gone sideways — and asking a question neither side of America's culture war much likes to hear: what does neutrality actually require when a school picks one faith to celebrate?

Summary:  A federal lawsuit against the Palo Alto Unified School District has turned a high-school field trip to a mosque into a larger test of religious neutrality in public education. Jewish, Hindu, and Zoroastrian plaintiffs allege that students were encouraged to wear hijabs, observed or participated in prayer, received Qurans, and heard from a controversial Muslim activist, while other faiths received no comparable exposure. 

The dispute raises a fundamental constitutional question: where does legitimate teaching about religion end and religious participation or promotion begin? Coming amid national battles over Christianity, parental rights, and religion in public schools, the case complicates familiar culture-war alignments. Whatever its legal outcome, it asks whether neutrality requires schools to treat all religious traditions by the same standards.

On a Friday morning last fall, a busload of students from Palo Alto High School’s Social Justice Pathway [1] pulled up outside the Muslim Community Association’s mosque on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, a low tan building with a green dome that sits, incongruously, between a strip mall and a stretch of Silicon Valley office parks. 

The Pathway is a three-year elective sequence, the kind of program now found in dozens of ambitious public high schools, built around the premise that civic literacy requires direct contact with the world’s inequities — food deserts, housing policy, mass incarceration, and, that day, religion. 

Students removed their sneakers at the door. According to a complaint later filed in federal court, some of the girls were offered hijabs to wear inside; many put them on. They listened to a talk, watched or joined in prayer, and were sent home with copies of the Quran. Photographs were taken. Some ended up online.

Nine months later, the trip is the subject of a federal lawsuit that has become a proxy for a much larger argument the country is having with itself about what a public school is allowed to teach about God. 

The suit[2], filed August 7th in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by a newly formed advocacy group called Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools[3], together with a small roster of named plaintiffs. 

Two Jewish parents of Palo Alto High students, Jafi Lipson and Josh Lehrer; a Jewish alumna of the school, Sasha Ava Lehrer; a Jewish community member, Linor Levav; a Hindu parent; a Zoroastrian parent; and four plaintiffs identified in the complaint only as Does. It names the Palo Alto Unified School District and the school’s principal, Brent Kline, as defendants. 

According to the Chronicle[4], the district said it learned about the litigation through press coverage before it had even been formally served — a small but telling detail about how these disputes now travel, breaking in the news before they reach a docket.

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