How would you feel if your child went to his third grade, secular classroom one day and was instructed that he was going to attend a religious class without your permission? A class that, rather than demonstrating different viewpoints and allowing constructive discussion, serves to only indoctrinate children in one religion—a class that taught your child that only the Muslim faith is the way to live (and die)?

This very thing happened—only, instead of a Muslim class, it was a Christian one. If it were a Muslim class, do you think this behavior would’ve even been allowed in any secular school district? If it were a Wiccan, Buddhist, or even Jewish “little church on wheels,” as this program was described, not only would the whole situation have probably been avoided entirely—but entire communities be outraged, too.

The Associated Churches of Fort Wayne and Allen County—which do claim to be “nondenominational,” which can really be applied to any religion; I know dozens of “nondenominational Christians”—recently taught an actual Bible school curriculum in mobile classrooms on the grounds of a secular school. Parents were not notified of the classes, which surrounded teachings that, according to the Associated Churches, are, “based on understanding the word of God and applying it to our lives, living as an example of God's love, and trying to be more like Jesus every day.”

Exactly what we all want our kids to learn in school. Except that it’s not.

I have no problem with people teaching their children about their faith within their homes and places of worship. I also have no problem with teaching about religion in school—as long as it’s in a nonbiased way, where several viewpoints are presented and discussed, allowing for critical thinking, probative discourse, and other things that should be in schools to take place. “Understanding the word of God,” applying in this very limited interpretation of the Bible and how this group views the word God itself, has no place in a non-religious classroom. Period.

The American Civil Liberties Union is helping one outraged family who found out about the lesson file a suit against the school. The mandates of the suit ask that the judge rule the program unconstitutional, thereby banning it from the school in the future.

What I want to know is why the hell it’s allowed to be there in the first place? I don’t think a lawsuit should even be warranted; an automatic removal of the program and instruction to not promote it on a public school again should suffice, wouldn’t you think?