The case drew the attention of the Bush administration in December 2005. “Religious worship is also communicative,” the Justice Department said in a brief, and the government “has an interest in enforcement of First Amendment principles providing equal treatment of persons irrespective of their religious beliefs.”
The meeting rooms in question have been reserved by such groups as the Sierra Club and Narcotics Anonymous, and were used in May 2004 by the Faith Center to hold a general meeting and prayer service. Two months later, library officials denied permission to use the rooms for additional services, specifying that the religious discussions were permissible, but not worship services. After losing the first court decision, Contra Costa County appealed, arguing that allowing such activities was tantamount to asking taxpayers to subsidize religious exercises.
“Religious worship services is a category of speech that we are allowed to exclude,” county attorney Kelly Flanagan explained in a September 21 Associated Press report. “Had we said Christians can use this but Jews can’t, that would be discrimination.”
Judge Lawrence Karlton, who cast the decisive vote, wrote that the “sorry state of the law” was the result of Supreme Court rulings that have blurred the division between “religious practice and secular speech.” In his dissenting opinion, Judge Richard Tallman wrote, “Separating religious worship from other religious speech inevitably leads to state entanglement in religion,” which is beyond the government’s authority.
According to the September 21 San Francisco Chronicle, a lawyer for the Faith Center intends to appeal the decision. Gary McCaleb, an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is defending the church group, told the AP, “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.”
Posted September 22, 2006.