GIVE Creating Youth Brigades?

Supporters of an Americorps expansion plan pending in Congress laud its efforts to “leverage” federal dollars to boost state, local and other resources to “address national and local challenges,” while critics say its fine print secretly would create an “Obama-styled army of community organizers modeled after Saul Alinsky’s ‘Peoples Organizations.’” So which is it?

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The latest version includes a “National Service Reserve Corps” whose members have completed a “term of national service,” “has successfully completed training” and “complete not less than 10 hours of volunteering
each year.”

It also raises First Amendment issues over its limitations on what various corps participants are allowed to do.

For example, it states those in an “approved national service position” may not try to influence legislation, engage in protests or petitions, take positions on union organizing, engage in partisan political activities, or, among other issues, be “engaging in religious instruction, conducting worship services, providing instruction as part of a program that includes mandatory religious instruction or worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of proselytization.”

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Florida School District Bans Distribution of Bible on Religious Freedom Day

A Florida school district has banned distribution of the Bible on Religious Freedom Day.

Earlier this month, World Changers of Florida was denied the right to distribute the Bible in the Collier County School District during non-instructional time. Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, is handling the case.

“The school district said that the Bible cannot be distributed on Religious Freedom Day,” he explains. “It had been distributed on Religious Freedom Day for the past several years, but this time they changed their decision and said it would be unconstitutional to distribute the Bible in a public school to willing recipients who want to receive the Bible.”

Staver notes that other items are distributed at the schools for secular events. In a Liberty Counsel press release, he stated that “limiting access to the forum based on religious viewpoint violates the First Amendment.”
Matt Staver
“This particular school says that everything goes but the Bible is banned,” he adds. “The Bible is essentially treated like contraband, where it was once the central part of our educational system.”

Liberty Counsel has written to the school district outlining the Constitution and court decisions that demonstrate the error in their decision.

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