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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Meeting Room AppealThe U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in the case of Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries v. Glover. The decision affirms that the Antioch branch of Contra Costa County (Calif.) Library acted properly in denying a church the use of its meeting rooms for religious worship services. The justices denied the appeal without comment on October 1, the first day of their 2007–08 term. The Faith Center Church filed its lawsuit after its circulated flyers inviting the public to attend religious worship services at the library led to the group being told that library policy explicitly prohibits the use of its meeting rooms for “religious services or activities.” Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom explained in an October 2 posting to the ALA office’s blog: “The Ninth Circuit held that the library . . . could reasonably conclude that a worship service could undermine the library’s purpose of making itself available to the whole community by disrupting the library and alienating other users.” The court also “cautioned that the library could not prohibit religious groups from engaging in other religious activities, including reading, Bible discussions, Bible instruction, praying, singing, sharing testimony, and discussing political or social issues. They noted that it would be difficult for a library to distinguish between these kinds of activities and a worship service, but when a religious group self-identifies its activity as a religious worship service, as Faith Center did in its flyers, the library could apply its policy and exclude the group from its meeting rooms.” In the same posting, Theresa Chmara, general counsel for the Freedom to Read Foundation, noted that the decision applies only to the Ninth Circuit (California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands) and “appears to be a departure from the interpretation of other courts on use of meeting rooms by religious groups.” The original ruling is also limited by the fact that it “relied on Faith Center Church’s own description of its meeting as a ‘worship’ service and failed to address a dissenting judge’s concern that librarians cannot and should not be trying to make these determinations. No court has held that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause requires libraries to prohibit meeting room use by religious groups engaged in worship,” she said. The October 2 Contra Costa Times reported that legal counsel for the Faith Center Church said the group will continue to pursue legal remedies by appealing to the lower court for a permanent injunction using a separate set of legal standards. The Supreme Court had been asked to review a temporary injunction from the Ninth Circuit. Posted on October 5, 2007. |
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