Court allows Bible verses on prep game banners

Christian cheerleaders started lawsuit in 2012

Christian cheerleaders in a small city in east Texas can continue to display Bible verses at football games, the state’s highest court has decided, bringing them closer to the end of a yearslong battle with their school district.

Since the lawsuit was filed six years ago, multiple courts have sided with the cheerleaders at Kountze Independent School District, ruling they have a First Amendment right to display religious messages at school events. On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by district officials to rethink those rulings, handing the cheerleaders yet another victory that could mark the end of this legal saga.

The case became a proxy battle in the war over where one person’s religious rights end, and secular society begins. The cheerleaders have received widespread support from Christian groups and Texas’ top Republicans, as well as legal support from the First Liberty Institute, a Plano-based nonprofit and breeding ground for conservative legal thinkers.

“As the football season kicks off across Texas, it’s good to be reminded that these cheerleaders have a right to have religious speech on their run-through banners — banners on which the cheerleaders painted messages they chose, with paint they paid for, on paper they purchased,” Hiram Sasser, First Liberty’s general counsel and an attorney for the cheerleaders, said Friday. “School districts everywhere should learn an important lesson from this failed litigation.

“Stop harassing cheerleaders and accept that they are free to have religious speech on their run-through banners.”

Tom Brandt, the Kountze school district’s attorney, said he was disappointed with the decision but held out hope his clients may have a chance to appeal.

“We’re not happy with this result, but I’m not willing to say that there’s no possibility we can change this,” Brandt told The Dallas Morning News. “I don’t think the case is completely over.”

Brandt pointed to a 2011 case in which a federal appeals court ruled a cheerleader in Silsbee, Texas, couldn’t refuse to root for a basketball player she said raped her because she “served as a mouthpiece through which (the school district) could disseminate speech.” The Silsbee cheerleader appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear her case.

The disconnect between that federal case and this state case, Brandt said, could keep their lawsuit alive: “Those two cases are still in tension. They haven’t been resolved.”