West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

In the 1930s, the president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, began objecting to state laws requiring school students to salute the flag as a means of instilling patriotism, and in 1936 he declared that baptized Jehovah's Witnesses who saluted the flag were breaking their covenant with God and were committing idolatry. Children of Jehovah's Witnesses had been expelled from school and were threatened with exclusion for refusing to salute the American flag. One such expulsion resulted in the Supreme Court case Minersville School District v. Gobitis in 1940, in which the high court sided with school districts and advised dissenting parents to try to change procedures via standard political processes. Recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance was also required. Failure to comply was considered "insubordination" and dealt with by expulsion; the expelled student would then be considered a delinquent, and their parents could be fined up to $50 and jailed up to thirty days. Marie and Gathie Barnett (whose surname was spelled incorrectly in the court papers) were Jehovah's Witnesses attending Slip Hill Grade School near Charleston, who were instructed by their father not to salute the flag or recite the pledge. They were expelled for their refusal. Their parents continued to send the girls to school each day, only for the school to send them back home. The Barnett family filed suit in the District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, alleging that the regulation violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the freedoms of speech and religion under the First Amendment, The District Court enjoined enforcement against students. Due to the case's constitutional implications, the West Virginia School Board appealed directly to the United States Supreme Court. == Arguments ==

At the Supreme Court, the School Board argued that the Barnetts raised no substantial federal question, and the Board's stance rested upon the Gobitis precedent. The American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union filed amicus curiae briefs arguing that Gobitis was bad law and should be overruled. == Supreme Court decision ==

The Court, in a 6–3 decision delivered by Justice Robert H. Jackson, held that it was unconstitutional for public schools to compel students to salute the flag. It thus overruled its decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis three years earlier, finding that the flag salute was "a form of utterance" and "a primitive but effective means of communicating ideas", and therefore was speech to which the First Amendment applied. The Court wrote that any "compulsory unification of opinion" was doomed to failure and was antithetical to free speech values. In Jackson's words: == Impact ==

The Supreme Court's ruling on Barnette is considered a crucial precedent on the freedoms established by the Bill of Rights and the risk of governments restricting them via discriminatory laws. It is considered to be a formative precedent on not just freedom of religion; but also on the matter of compelled speech, as governments attempt to coerce citizens into taking oaths when they would not do so under their own free will, particularly for religious reasons. In a 2006 commemorative event cosponsored by the Justice Robert H. Jackson Center and the Supreme Court Historical Society, Supreme Court law clerks from the Barnette court were on a panel with the two eponymous Barnetts. Just as she and her sister had been in 1942, Gathie Barnett Edmonds noted that her own son was also sent to the principal's office for not saluting the flag. == See also ==