FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LAS CRUCES, NM - In a lawsuit filed today by the American Civil
Liberties Union of New Mexico, three Muslim athletes accused New Mexico State
University head football coach Hal Mumme of discharging them from the school’s
football team in 2005 because of their religious beliefs. The lawsuit charges
Mumme, university provost William Flores and the university Board of Regents
with religious discrimination and violations of the athletes’ right to freely
exercise their religion.
“Universities are supposed to be places of evolved thinking and reason, not
of base intolerance and bigotry,” said ACLU of New Mexico Executive Director
Peter Simonson. “They are supposed to rise above the knee-jerk prejudices
that sometimes afflict our society. In this case, the university failed
its purpose and a coach indulged in those prejudices to assert his own religious
preferences over the players and the team.”
The ACLU is representing Mu-Ammar Ali, who played on athletic scholarship for
the team for three consecutive seasons, and twin brothers Anthony and Vincent
Thompson, who joined the team in 2004.
According to the lawsuit, when Mumme took over as coach in Spring 2005, he
established a practice of having players lead the Lord’s Prayer after each
practice and before each game. Ali and the Thompsons said that the
practice made them feel like outcasts and caused them to pray separately from
the other players.
Not long after Mumme learned that Ali and the Thompsons were Muslim, he
prohibited the Thompsons from attending the spring 2005 training camp and
questioned Ali about his attitudes towards Al-Qaeda.
The Thompsons were discharged from the team on September 2, 2005, allegedly
because they moved their belongings to an unapproved locker and were labeled
“troublemakers.” On October 9, 2005, Mumme left Ali a message on his home
answering machine that his jersey was being pulled and that he was discharged
from the NMSU football team.
“Being coach doesn’t give someone the right to make a football team into a
religious brotherhood,” Simonson said. “University coaches are tax-paid role
models. The public has a right to expect that they are going to model
behaviors that we endorse as a society. Religious intolerance is not one
of those behaviors.”
Plaintiffs seek compensatory and punitive damages. Attorneys for the
ACLU are Joleen Youngers and ACLU staff attorney George Bach.
The complaint is online at
http://www.aclu.org/religion/schools/26595lgl20060829.html
