State Senator and 8th District Congressional candidate Roy Herron today applauded the Tennessee Board of Education’s approval yesterday of guidelines for teaching the Bible in public high schools.
A former minister, Herron was the architect of the 2008 legislation passed by the Tennessee General Assembly that required the Board of Education to create such guidelines and model curriculum.
“For years I heard Tennesseans complain that God had been taken out of our schools,” Senator Herron said. “These citizens realized that too many public school administrators and school boards understandably refused to offer Bible courses for fear of being sued.
“I wrote this legislation to enable the Bible to be taught in our schools because we had simply surrendered our children’s First Amendment Rights. In too many schools, the Bible effectively had become a banned book,” he added.
“I am pleased that our bill passed by the General Assembly in 2008 has now been addressed by the Tennessee Board of Education to help our public schools teach Bible courses.”
In creating the legislation, Senator Herron said he used his training as one of the first two graduates of Vanderbilt University’s joint Divinity and Law program. He said his experience as an attorney and as a minister helped him "in working with pastors and lawyers to create a law that was both sensitive to spiritual needs and constitutional."
Senator Herron also wrote the Tennessee Student Religious Liberty Act which was signed into law in 1997. That Act protects the rights of public school students to voluntarily pray alone or with others. It also protects students’ rights to express and share religious viewpoints, and possess and distribute religious literature. Students also are permitted to be absent from school for religious holidays or practices.
Senator Herron and his wife, Nancy, are the parents of two recent graduates of public schools, and their third son is a sophomore at Dresden High School.