An evangelical Christian church will not be allowed to meet at a
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Wednesday reversed a lower court judge who had allowed the Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries of
The judges said that the library is a "limited" forum, where religious speech is not protected under the First Amendment in the same way as political speech.
Nonsense, said the church's attorney, Alliance Defense Fund Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull, who said he will appeal.
"Christian community groups should not be treated any differently than other community groups," Bull said.
Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, a prominent religious rights attorney in
"This is just another example of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals going off the map," Staver said. "Every other court in the country would have come down the other way, in my opinion, and ruled in favor of allowing the facility to be used for religious speech—and certainly religious worship."
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said the appeals court judges did more than "get it wrong."
"They misconstrued Supreme Court law," he said, "and totally went against a 2nd Circuit case which had already addressed this issue. Basically they decided on a course of action which could only have resulted from animosity towards religion."
Bull said the panel of judges had ruled in such a way as to allow libraries—or other government entities—to "unconstitutionally exclude certain members of the community" from public meeting rooms based on the religious content of their speech.
In what he called "a supreme example of judicial activism," Bull said one of the judges, Senor Circuit Judge Lawrence Karlton, essentially re-wrote the First Amendment, and removed religious speech from its protections.
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."
And further: "It is simply untenable to insist that there is no difference between a prayer and, e.g., political speech. To coin a phrase, one can only pray for the (Supreme) Court’s enlightenment."
The dissenting voice on the court, Circuit Judge Richard C. Tallman, said the county's exclusion of religious speech was "impermissible viewpoint discrimination" because the library had opened the meeting room up for public use.
Bull agreed with Tallman's assessment.
Once a library opens up a community room to the public at large, it is "simply unconstitutional" to discriminate against patrons based on whether they use the space for religious purposes, Bull said.
"Do we really want library officials to be the local free speech police deciding when religious speech somehow becomes 'too religious?' he asked. "That's what happened here."
The religious liberties attorneys predict the appeals panel will be reversed, either by all the judges of the 9th Circuit meeting together—or by the U.S. Supreme Court.
