This guy seems to have solved the whole religious displays in public problem. But I am not a lawyer. What do you think? On the link it the post from Tuesday, December 05, 2006. http://www.courtzero.org/
Judges aren’t stupid. Putting wings on a dog doesn’t make it a bat.
Declaring a three foot square piece of wall a museum won’t make it one, either.
Ooh. I’m going to use that in the next opinion I draft.
Ammonius Saccus, I have trimmed your quote down to a manageable size.
Please note the rules regarding copyright for posting on the Striaght Dope. (In fact, it is not a bad idea to read all the Rules for Posting at the Straight Dope Message Boards.)
[ /Moderating ]
It would be amusing to have that British Airways check in woman declared a museum.
I must confess I’ve never seen a more aggressive cross.
Courts aren’t usually fooled by obvious shams.
Wouldn’t a much simpler solution simply be to not display religious iconography in these areas?
Are people’s faith so weak that they must propose ridiculously circuitous legal shams to have religious symbols everywhere they look or they start to degenerate into heretics?
Or that they need to have their faith’s legends shown to them in cartoon characters?
Or that there is a need for them to display their religiousity in public in contradiction to Matthew’s stricture?
What’s “forbidden” about any of those objects? Forbidden to whom? That whole premise is bullshit.
There is already a solution to these problems, it’s just that the fanatics don’t like them.
You can display all the religion you want on your private property. On government land, any land can be converted into an open forum, where anyone can put up a religious display or any other free speech element, provided the forum is viewpoint neutral.
The problem is that the fanatics don’t like the latter solution. What they want is government land specifically set aside for their religion and their religion only.
A good example is the recent case in which Liberty University sued a school district to allow church bulletins to be sent home with kids. They made a good case that the bulletin program was an open public forum, and so could not restrict religious flyers and they won, in my opinion rightly. But then the UU church sent home a flyer about pagan festivals. And the religious right went batshit insane over it, completely forgetting their whole rationale of open forum.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53250
That’s because they care about using the government to push their particular religious point of view, not about freedom of religion.
This reminds me of that one idea sometimes proposed by gun-control types — of permitting sales of any gun imaginable but banning all bullets. It’s a laughably transparent side-step, and nobody with more than three functioning brain cells could possibly be duped by it.
I dunno, Cervaise. I know how to load my own. I wouldn’t mind owning a P-90, even if I had to handload and mold every bullet.
Has there really been a decision that said a particular symbol had to be destroyed? Are these symbols really that powerful that they must be thrown back into the fires from which they were forged?
Yes.
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The enemies of the First Amendment have already tried the trick of putting religious junk on a tiny sliver of private property in the midst of public property. It didn’t fly. The courts held, oddly enough, that the government must obey the first amendment rather than trying to abolish it with an abusrd technicality. This proposal would fail for the same reason.
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A museum is defined as a building or institution. A fraction of a room inside a non-museum can’t be a museum.
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Enemy of First Amendment: This right here is the Museum of Forbidden Iconography and Symbology. It contains objects “forbidden by American jurists”.
Ordinary American: So what’s forbidden here?
EoFA: The Ten Commandments display is forbidden.
OA: If the Ten Commandments are forbidden, how can they be one of the most commonly displayed things in the country? Do you even know that the word “forbidden” means?
EoFA: Well of course I didn’t mean that that the museum of Forbidden Iconography and Symbology contains anything forbidden. The Museum of Iconography and Symbology contains one object that is not forbidden. But the jurists won’t allow us to keep it right here.
OA: Then why is it right here?
EoFA: Uh. Ummm. Uhhhhhhh. Ummmmmmmmm. I’m sure someone on the internet would know.
To summarize, this proposal is a repeat of something that’s already failed, it’s dishonest, it’s insulting, it’s self-contradictory, and it involves butchering the English language. In other words, it’s exactly what we expect from the enemies of the First Amendment.
Next question please.
What case says this cannot be done?
If the first Congress that passed the First Amendment thought it was OK and passed a resolution to have an Episcopal minister (who they are paying) read Episcopal prayers (from the Book of Common Prayer) at an Episcopal church after the inauguration of President Washington, why can’t we have a simple display on public property?
So, would this museum of yours also include satanist paraphenalia? Buddhist, Hindu, and Shinto statues? Idols? A “God sucks” poster?
All of these would be forbidden by the first amendment, and should go into the museum.
McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky, among others.
Because the First Amendment prohibits our government from making an establishment of religion. If persons entering a courthouse have to observe an order to obey one religion and foresake any other, that would certainly constitute the government establishing a religion as the law of the land. The hypothetical situation you envision with the founding fathers would not affect this one way or the other, since an Episcopal minister reading from the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t result in any changes to the text of the First Amendment.
Next question please.
McCreary County v ACLU
In that case, a County judge put up a display of the 10 commandments alone in a courthouse. Someone sued, and the judge put up a second display of the 10 commandments, surrounded by various other slogans. Someone sued again.
Finally, the judge put up a display of a dozen or so documents which included the 10 commandments, but also included the national motto, the national anthem, the Declaration of Independence, and other such things. The display was intended to be (or was claimed to be) a display of documents central to the foundation of the United States.
The Supreme Court saw through this charade, seeing that the real purpose of the display was to find some way of displaying the 10 commandments in a courthouse, by hook or by crook, and invalidated it on the grounds that a reasonable observer, familiar with the history of the display, would recognize that the display had a religious sectarian purpose, something the government is not allowed to engage in.
Now, a case argued the same day, Van Orden v Perry, held a different 10 commandments display on the Texas state capitol grounds to be perfectly acceptable. It was 5-4, as was the other case, so there’s really no consensus, even on the Supreme Court, as to what exactly is acceptable. But current caselaw clearly demonstrates that it is unconstitutional to display the 10 commandments in an otherwise unconstitutional way, even if a sham excuse (such as “This is a museum now!”) is offered.
Actually, the First Amendment prohibits the government from respecting an establishment of religion, in other words, from doing things that are preferential to one religion over another. Clearly, a Ten Commandments display is preferential to the Abrahamic religions. QED.