Oklahomans are using the legal system to challenge Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Bible teaching mandate in public schools.
Dozens of Oklahoma parents, teachers, and religious leaders filed a lawsuit against Walters and the state Department of Education on Thursday, asking the Oklahoma Supreme Court to interfere in the mandate’s implementation. Walters indicated in September that he planned to spend up to $3 million on the purchase and intracurricular usage of Bibles in Oklahoma public schools.
The plaintiffs in Thursday’s lawsuit included 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders, all of whom condemned the effort for attempting to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on what they described as an unethical, unconstitutional, and illegal reallocation of resources. According to the lawsuit, Walters’ plan would “unlawfully support an invalid rule” since “no statutory or other legislative authority exists” to spend state monies on specified curricular materials. Instead, the lawsuit only allows the Department of Education to distribute state funding to local school districts, requiring them to “spend on texts of their own choice.”
“Respondents intend to spend on the Bibles funds that were designated for other purposes and have not been lawfully reallocated,” the lawsuit’s plaintiffs said.
Curiously, when Oklahoma’s Department of Education opened bids to fill a 55,000-unit purchase of Bibles for classrooms across the state, Walters’ criteria for qualifying Bibles became unusually restrictive.
The bidding documents stipulated strict requirements for the Bible, including its King James version, inclusion of key historical elements from the US educational system like the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and binding of the text in leather or a material similar to leather. That reduced the pool of candidates to just one obvious choice: Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible.
That aspect did not sit well with the suing Oklahomans, who stated in their lawsuit that it appeared “highly unlikely that anyone could fulfill the requirements” of the bid other than Trump’s version. Furthermore, the group attacked the state for proposing to spend up to $54.55 on every Trumpian Bible—only a few dollars less than the text’s market price—when other Bibles can be acquired for as low as $3 each.
“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” Erika Wright, the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We are devout Christians, but different Christian denominations have different theological beliefs and practices. It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.
“Oklahoma’s education system is already struggling, ranking nearly last in national standings,” Wright continued. “Mandating a Bible curriculum will not address our educational shortcomings.”
