Suit against Kentucky children’s home to proceed

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Kentucky taxpayers, including a former longtime professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, renewed a legal challenge to taxpayer funding of a Baptist home that fired a staff member in 1998 after learning she is a lesbian.

Judge Charles Simpson III of the U.S. District Court of Western Kentucky said July 5 that Alicia Pedreira, a former case worker at Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, now known as Sunrise Children’s Services, and three other plaintiffs could file a second amended complaint that her firing for religious reasons from a publicly funded position violated the First Amendment ban on government establishment of religion. The other plaintiffs include Paul Simmons, an ordained Baptist who taught at the seminary in Louisville for 23 years and former board member of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Pedreira and Simmons, along with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary professor Johanna W.H. Van Wuk-Bos and Unitarian Universalist minister Elwood Sturtevant, claim Kentucky’s practice of providing government funds to finance positions that are filled according to religious tenets “constitutes evidence of a violation of the Establishment Clause.”

They are asking the courts to declare unconstitutional the Commonwealth’s funding of “pervasively religious entities” without any restrictions or safeguards against those funds being used for religious indoctrination.