When Colorado high school senior Sophia Shumaker was offered the chance to paint a design of her choice on her senior parking spot at the school, Shumaker didn’t hesitate to include her religion.
“I originally wanted to choose the parable from Luke 15 of the shepherd and the 99 sheep, but then I kind of altered it to a backwards fish,” Shumaker tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”
“The backwards fish is kind of what people in the Bible used to draw in the dirt when they couldn’t really talk about religion and they wanted to know if the other people were Christians,” Shumaker explains.
“It was against the rules to do Christian imagery,” she adds.
“When she was told she couldn’t do the original design … she decided to do the backwards fish sort of in somewhat of a protest of not being able to do the original design,” First Liberty attorney Keisha Russell chimes in.
“They said just because of the religious imagery and the Bible verse, it probably wouldn’t get approved and stuff like that. And so, I didn’t want to go through all the hassle, and so I just changed the design completely to kind of symbolize my Christianity, but I don’t think they really knew what it was,” Shumaker says.
When Shumaker told her mother that she had to change her design because it promoted her religion, her mother decided to reach out to First Liberty — which had taken on a very similar case in the past.
“They said they would take our case, and then the news got involved, and then they sent the letter to my school, and within a couple days the case was over. And it got approved, and I got to repaint it,” Shumaker tells Stuckey.
“The other different thing about this case was that throughout the district, other seniors were allowed to put religious things on their parking spaces. So, now you have this sort of inconsistent policy being applied differently, which makes the case very difficult for the school district,” Russell chimes in.
“It’s harder for them to say, ‘Oh, we’re controlling this. This is just government speech,’ when clearly they’re not. And so, when we wrote the letter, we included all of that, and we just said, ‘Look, we’d like to resolve this amicably with a letter, but we are willing to sue you if you continue to violate her rights. And so, we’re asking you to change your policy and let Sophia paint what she wanted to paint,’” she continues.
After the news got involved, the school “relented,” and “not only did they let Sophia repaint her spot, but they changed their entire policy” and removed the religious restrictions, Russell explains.
“So, really, really great outcome in this case,” she adds.
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