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Page: Profile: Wren's Nest News Local
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Article: 20318
[Legal]
Date Posted:
1/13/2009
3:59:59 pm EST
Wvox Stats
Views: 3,004
RSS: 17,443
Comments: 3
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High Court Turns Away Va. Council-Prayer Case
Author: The Associated Press Source: First Amendment Center Online
Title: HIGH COURT TURNS AWAY VA. COUNCIL-PRAYER CASE
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by a Fredericksburg City Council member who was barred from invoking Jesus at council meetings.
The high court yesterday declined to hear the case of the Rev. Hashmel Turner, who claimed that the city was violating his First Amendment rights. The case is Turner v. Fredericksburg, Va., City Council.
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Community Thoughts: There are 3 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| Interesting... | Jan 14th. at 8:45:20 pm EST
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bigcat (peoria, Illinois) - Email Me
It wasn't what he said, but where he said it that matters. The fact is, he was trying to conduct a prayer session over a captive audience in an inappropriate place as if he was a preacher.
I'm glad they declined it though it leaves a lot of other cases open for conjecture.
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| Hashmel The Crook | Jan 14th. at 10:44:39 am EST
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Terry (Irvington, Virginia) - Email Me
There's an easy way for Rev. Turner to practice Christianity, were that his religion, by going into his closet and privately praying as he sees fit.
Clearly he's not a Christian by biblical definitions, but a deranged criminal under US laws. He became a government official in order to violate law restricting use of public offices for evangelical religious predation and violation of citizen rights. He's too obsessed to follow the rule of law, even when repeatedly ordered to do so by fellow council members or the city attorney, or Federal courts. There are places for people like that, with fine young men in nice white coats, well protected from serious life issues or responsibilities for operation of government.
The resolution of this suit doesn't fix some long standing paradox and hypocrisy issues in US case law. Instead, it merely shows the courts are standing behind a bad opinion from 1983 in Marsh v Chambers, that pretends Protestant lite public pandering of prayers is somehow neutral and inclusive, rather than strongly prejudiced to archaic notions of Congregational and Anglican sects coexisting and subordinating Catholics, pagans, atheists, and many others. Relative to modern societal "fact" (as legally defined) , the only honest way to comply with the theoretical tests of Constitutional validity in "Marsh" is almost what Newdow et al have attempted to litigate, not a ban on religious people having their rights to participate in government cut off as FFRF has promoted, but a ban on any public religious rituals sponsored by government, from however many sources, since it's inherently impossible to design such doctrines in ways that don't then inherently discriminate against religions (as broadly defined in law, not narrowly by many individuals) that avoid public pandering or have ideological reasons for maintaining privacy or secrecy of individual or group practices.
"Non-sectarian" does not mean "religion neutral" or "secular" as courts of recent decades have fraudulently pretended. If it did, then it's likely "non-sectarian prayers" would be justifiable, but Rev. Turner's Jeezus juicing as a government official in the course of official acts out of bounds. "Non-sectarian" means neutral within the scope of select sectarian religions, essentially common Protestant ones and maybe others with overlapping Abrahamic frameworks for more liberal xtians. That long standing legal mess is still overdue for clean up, whether by honest review of legal fact that upholds "Marsh" but finds any possible serious and honest compliance to ban all public pandering of prayer, or by flat out reversing Marsh and holding it impossible today to do "neutral and inclusive" public prayers, even if there was a viable notion of that in Colonial times (so long as one didn't ask Catholics, pagans, Quakers, Baptists, Indians not taxed, or others who many state laws told to FOAD, in times when that was a state's rights issue and not a Federal one) .
In effect, "non-sectarian" is akin to praying in Diana's name, in her many aspects and names among pagan traditions, so mote it be. Leading a skyclad spiral dance would be OK, but not opening an event to those "in perfect love and perfect trust", that pretty much tells everyone else to get lost. On one hand I'd find it annoying and maybe offensive to see pagan traditions pandered into government functions in those ways. On the other hand, we need to do so, as that could set up the legal evidence of discrimination to be argued in court as unequal protections of law relative to 14th Amendment equality and due process, as well as 1st Amendment Establishment neutrality. For the same reasons it was seen by many as blasphemous for a now deceased British princess to be named Diana, the larger notion of "non-sectarian prayer" is simply a legalese fraud fermented to a rancid stench.
Compartmentalizing as our legal system and society seem to promote, in ways that lose perspective on how these pieces fit together, "Cert denied" is closure for which it's time for me to send a "congrats" note to the original anonymous complainant in this cat and mouse game case, in whose husband's office I've spent hours discussing possible tactics to attempt to make this and a few similar actions backed by the VA ACLU more effective. Unfortunately, the larger issue still remains on the table:
What legal tactics constitute the much needed "Flush" lever for the larger mess?
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| ... | Jan 13th. at 8:22:35 pm EST
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Draken (Bronx, New York) - Email Me - Web
Wait...the same batch of Supremes who either let Chimpy in the White House or were selected by Chimpy? Am I missing something here?
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