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9th Circuit Bans Religious Expression From Public Libraries

    The decision came from a case involving the Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries, a Christian group which won a court order allowing them to hold a “prayer, praise and worship” service in meeting rooms open to other groups at a Contra Costa County library branch. A federal judge said it had a First Amendment right of religion to use the public’s facilities.

    But a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling in a 2-1 decision.

    “Prohibiting Faith Center’s religious worship services from the Antioch meeting room is a permissible exclusion of a category of speech,” Judge Richard Paez ruled.

    The Alliance Defense Fund, which is defending the church group, called the decision “astounding.” The group, he said, would consider appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court or asking the appeals court to reconsider.

    “Religious people … whether they’re Jewish, Muslim or Christian or any other faith under the sun, this is not what the First Amendment was intended to do, to authorize censorship of speech in public,” said Gary McCaleb, an ADF attorney.

It seems quite simple to me. The 9th Circuit’s decision here is in actuality a violation of the First Amendment. In no way is providing open access to all community groups including those of various faiths to assemble “establishing a religion”. Being open to a variety of faiths holds that it is not favoring one religion over another. What the Court’s decision does is violate the First Amendment by “prohibiting the free exercize thereof.” Somehow the attorney’s trying to censor religious expression have read the Constitution backwards.

    “Religious worship services is a category of speech that we are allowed to exclude,” said Kelly Flanagan, a county attorney.

ADF Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull, who argued the case and will be appealing it explains what should already be basic common sense to understand.

    “In a supreme example of judicial activism, Judge Karlton has essentially rewritten the First Amendment by tossing religious expression out of its protections,” noted Bull, referring to a concurring opinion written by Judge Lawrence Karlton. Karlton wrote, “As the First Amendment notes, religious speech is categorically different than secular speech and is subject to analysis under the Establishment and Free Exercise Clause without regard to the jurisprudence of free speech.”

    ADF attorneys represent Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries and its leader, Hattie Hopkins. Contra Costa County library officials in Antioch had barred Hopkins and her fellow Christians from continuing to meet in a publicly available room after the first meeting, citing their policy of disallowing any religious services on the premises.

    “Once a library opens up a community room to the public, it is unconstitutional then for library officials to discriminate against patrons,” Bull explained. “Do we really want library officials to be the local free speech police, deciding when religious speech somehow becomes too religious? That’s what happened here.”

Isn’t it amazing and horrifying how these judges can use the First Amendment to violate the First Amendment? The Judge’s final decision states:

    Those, like myself, who advocate adherence to the strictures of the Establishment Clause, do so not out of hostility towards religion. Rather, we are motivated by recognition of the passions that deeply-held religious views engender, and the serious threat of marrying those passions to government power.

First of all I don’t see how allowing religious groups the same equal access to a public library as secular groups have is marrying religious passions to the government. What this judgement does is discriminate religious speech from the same First Amendment protections as secular speech. The most ironic and frightening thing about this ruling to me is that the primary speech intended to be protected by the First Amendment is relgious expression. It seems to me if you have no hostitlity towards religion then give it religious speech the same equal treatment that you give secular speech.