Magdalene Bedi, a junior at Northwest Rankin High School in 2013, didn't subscribe to an institutional religion, but considered herself spiritual—and not an atheist. Still, Christian prayer and ceremonies at school bothered her, and she usually escaped to the library during school assemblies.
In April of that year, Bedi's senior friends warned her that a local church was sponsoring an all-class assembly she would want to skip. Bedi tried to go to the library, but this time school officials told her she was required to attend the assembly.
As a result, Bedi sued Northwest Rankin for violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It would have violated her values not to fight back, she says now. "I am not a confrontational person," Bedi told the Jackson Free Press. "I did not intend to sue or lead a brigade against the Christians."
The problem was and still is that school-sponsored religious assemblies are illegal, in the most fundamental sense—the Constitution prohibits government from promoting or establishing a religion. Public schools are subject to religious freedom as established in the First Amendment in two ways. Schools are not allowed to sponsor or promote any religion, while they must allow students to create and form their own independent religious groups if they so choose.
The American Humanist Association or AHA stepped in to sue on Bedi's behalf, and a lawsuit followed. By November 2013, Bedi and the AHA established a consent decree that required Rankin County School District to pay Bedi's legal fees, admit liability to the assemblies and promise to abide by their new religion policy that said, "school activities conducted during instructional hours should neither advance, endorse or inhibit any religion." If the district violated these terms, AHA had the power to step in and file a motion for contempt.
Bedi thought she had won, but was dismayed when an ACT Awards Ceremony was opened with a prayer from a local minister, with words Bedi remembers as "we came here to celebrate not only life but death," invoking the Easter season into the ceremony.
At Bedi's notice of the awards ceremony and another violation based on a tip that a Rankin County elementary school was distributing Bibles, the AHA filed the motion for contempt they had promised, saying the school district blatantly disregarded the consent decree both parties made in 2013.
On July 13, 2015, Rankin County School District was found in contempt of court. U.S. District Circuit Judge Carlton Reeves ordered the school district to pay $7,500 in damages to Bedi. If another violation occurs, they will have to continue to pay Bedi, with a higher sticker price of $10,000 per infraction.
Matt Steffey, a law professor at Mississippi College of Law, said that the Establishment Clause at the school level invokes a complex body of law. Two main principles come into play with Bedi's case, however. "Government can't prefer one religion over another religion or over non-religion," Steffey said. "(Government) can't do anything that endorses a particular religion or religion generally, either."
