WASHINGTON — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund filed a petition at the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday asking the nation’s highest court to review a case involving a ministry denied the right to meet in a community room at a California county library open to other groups.
“County officials should not treat religious expression as second-class speech,” said ADF Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull. “Nothing in the Constitution requires the government to single out religious groups and censor their expression simply because their meetings have religious content.”
ADF attorneys represent Faith Center Church Evangelical Ministries and its leader, Hattie Hopkins. Contra Costa County Library officials in Antioch had forbidden Hopkins and her fellow Christian ministry members from continuing to meet in the library’s community room after the first meeting, citing their policy of prohibiting any “religious services” on the premises.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of ADF’s position in the case, agreeing that the library’s policy of banning religious groups like Faith Center from meeting in the library community rooms amounts to viewpoint discrimination and is unconstitutional (
www.telladf.org/news/story.aspx?cid=3611).
When a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit ruled against Faith Center, ADF attorneys filed a petition for rehearing en banc, asking the full panel to rehear the case. In March, the court declined.
“This is a very important case because it asks the question, does the U.S. Constitution allow government officials to act as the local free speech police, drawing arbitrary distinctions between ‘religious speech’ and ‘religious worship’?” said Bull. “The 9th Circuit’s 2006 ruling jettisoned three decades of equal access jurisprudence, and we hope the U.S. Supreme Court will decide to hear this case and reaffirm the constitutional right to religious expression and equal access.”
A copy of the petition for writ of certiorari filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in the case
Faith Center v. Glover can be read at
www.telladf.org/UserDocs/FaithCenterPetition.pdf.
ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
www.telladf.org