Maryland Attorney General:
It’s No Sin to Purge Scripture
The office of the Maryland attorney general issued an opinion earlier this month backing both the right of an individual to donate materials with religious quotes to a library as well as a library’s right to decide against disseminating them. The opinion was issued October 2 at the request of two state legislators last summer in reaction to Carroll County (Md.) Library Director Linda Mielke’s ordering volunteers to black out a biblical quote on 13,000 admission coupons to Shea’s Maze.
Corn-maze owner Suzanne Shea, who had given the coupons to the library as stuffers for summer-reading goodie bags, had asked the legislators to have Mielke’s decision reviewed in the belief that the library had violated her First Amendment rights. “Excluding the coupon would not have violated constitutional guarantees of free speech,” the attorney general’s office found.
Mielke said in the October 12 Baltimore Sun that she was “not surprised” by the opinion, affirming that striking out the biblical passage “was the right thing to do” because she “didn’t want to exclude” Shea’s coupon.
Posted October 22, 2001.
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