Suit Says School Promotes ‘Satanism’

BEDFORD, N.Y. —  A dispute over a faddish game has turned into a lawsuit accusing a school district in New York’s tony suburbs of promoting “Satanism and occultism.”

Three Roman Catholic families say their religious freedom has been infringed upon by such standard school fare as an assembly featuring a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, a science class studying the leftover evidence of an owl’s lunch and a history lesson in a cemetery.

School officials see the lawsuit as “a threat to schools everywhere,” said Bruce Dennis, supervisor of the Bedford Central School District, about 20 miles north of New York City.

Several parents plan to join the schools’ defense against the 1996 federal court lawsuit by filing a friend-of-the-court brief. The next hearing in the case is set for April 25.

“We can’t take apart the science or English curriculum because something seems to go against some part of a particular small group’s belief system,” said one of the schools’ supporters, the Rev. Paul Alcorn, a Presbyterian minister who has two children in the schools.

“We would dismantle public education in this country. Maybe that’s what they’re trying to do.”

The dispute stems from a game called “Magic: The Gathering” that children started playing in 1995 in the district in Westchester County’s well-to-do horse country.

The Dungeons & Dragons-like strategy game, played with collectible trading cards, involves the supernatural. Some of the cards are lurid depictions of demons and one shows a woman about to be sacrificed.

“It’s straight from Satan,” said Mary Ann DiBari, a plaintiff who has 11- and 13-year-old granddaughters in the schools. “Human sacrifice, devil worship, spells.”

Some students formed a club whose members were allowed to play the game on school grounds but not during class. Players and the school district defended it as a “math game.”

The lawsuit says that by allowing the game on school grounds, the district “officially promoted and endorsed” an occult activity, and promoted “satanism and occultism, pagan religions and New Age spirituality.”

Besides the card game itself, the lawsuit complains that:

* Third-graders were told to venerate pagan gods when a teacher had them make Hindu “idols.” The teacher, Jackie Reizes, held up a paper elephant mask at a parents’ meeting, said it was the idol referred to in the suit and added: “I think this speaks for itself.”

* On an excursion to a cemetery, fourth-graders were instructed to lie on the graves of dead children. The school district’s lawyer, Warren Richmond, said a volunteer was asked to lie on a grave to show how much smaller people were in the 18th century.

* A man who dressed as Lincoln frightened some children when he said Lincoln believed in ghosts. “It was just a fellow who gave a speech on Abe Lincoln,” Richmond said.

* Third-graders were forced to study owl pellets, the regurgitated bones and feathers of the birds’ prey. The lawsuit included that under “Earth worship and New Age spiritism.”

Several youngsters, including the minister’s son, staged a benefit tournament at his Bedford Presbyterian Church “so parents who were concerned could see the game, see the cards,” Alcorn said.

“They were acting in a more mature fashion than the four people who called me and said how could I raise my son that way, how could I be a pastor,” the minister said.

“The allegations in the complaint have seriously distorted what are really very normal educational practices,” Richmond said.

Jordi Portell Weinstock, a senior at Fox Lane High School, said he was happy with his education.

“They teach you more and more a multicultural view of the world, in social studies and in English,” he said. “It’s important that we learn about other societies.”