On The Front Lines
Rutherford Institute Asks Appeals Court to Uphold City Councilman Hashmel Turner's Right to Pray 'in Jesus' Name'
RICHMOND, Va. --Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have asked a federal appeals court to affirm the right of a Virginia City Councilman to pray according to his conscience at City Council meetings. The appeal comes in response to a lower court ruling that dismissed a First Amendment lawsuit against the City Council of Fredericksburg, Va., for adopting a prayer policy that discriminates against city council member Hashmel Turner because of his Christian beliefs and prevents him from praying at council meetings according to his conscience and religious beliefs. The Fredericksburg City Council's policy prohibiting sectarian prayers was adopted after the ACLU of Virginia threatened them with a lawsuit if they did not take steps to pressure or force Turner to stop praying in Jesus Christ's name. In their brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Institute attorneys argue that the Fredericksburg City Council's policy regarding prayers at the start of council meetings violates Turner's constitutional rights to free speech, to freely exercise his religious beliefs and to equal protection of the law.
A copy of the brief is available here.
"The essential question in this case is whether the government can provide an opportunity to pray to a select group of individuals, all the while dictating the content of the prayers and excluding anyone who refuses to go along with their dictates," stated John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "The answer, as the Supreme Court has ruled in the past, is in the negative--the government simply cannot prescribe or proscribe the content of any 'official' prayer without violating the Establishment Clause, and it cannot discriminate against any person based on his or her religious viewpoint without violating that person's rights to free speech and free religious expression."
Hashmel Turner has been a member of the Fredericksburg City Council since 2002. Since the 1950s, the City Council has called upon council members, on a rotating basis, to open its meetings with prayer. Upon his election in 2002, Turner asked to be placed on the rotating schedule to pray. During this time, of the approximately 100 prayers presented by various City Council members, Turner offered less than 10 prayers. In nearly all of those prayers, Turner closed by praying in the name of Jesus Christ because he sincerely believes that he is required to do so by his faith. Turner specifically offered his prayers both for himself individually that he might have divine wisdom and guidance in carrying out his responsibilities and likewise for the deliberation of the City Council. After several prayers were offered by Turner in this rotating schedule, the ACLU threatened to sue the City Council for violating the Establishment Clause by allowing Turner to invoke the name of Jesus Christ in his prayers. Soon after, the City Council adopted a policy permitting only "nondenominational" prayers. Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute then filed suit against the City of Fredericksburg's City Council for its discriminatory policy. In August 2006, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed Turner's case on the basis that his prayers constituted "government speech." However, as Institute attorneys pointed out in their appellate brief, "government cannot itself pray, thus prayer cannot be government speech." Moreover, the Supreme Court's "government speech" doctrine has traditionally been applied only where the government actually controlled the content of the speech at issue. Because the individual council members control the content of their prayers, the prayers do not constitute government speech.
