Liberty Counsel Misunderstands or Misrepresents the Law

It's all-too-frequent that I witness Christian Nationalists misrepresenting the law. I'm often unsure whether I'm seeing deliberate misrepresentation as part of an effort to deceive people, or simply a misunderstanding due to the fact that the law can be complicated — and often runs contrary to what Christian Nationalists want. This problem even extends to those whose job it is fight legal battles on behalf of further Christianizing American culture and politics.

Case in point is the Liberty Counsel, a far-right legal organization which decided to get involved with a legal case in Utah. The religious group Summum wants to install a "Seven Aphorisms" monument near a Ten Commandments monument. The government of Pleasant Grove is thus faced with an unpleasant choice: refuse the Seven Aphorisms and thereby signal that the Ten Commandments is favored (which will lead to their removal), or accept the Seven Aphorisms and thereby de-value the Ten Commandments as the sole monument in the park. This is a fairly simple legal issue, but the Liberty Counsel doesn't seem to get it.

Summum, which claims to represent both the “inner workings of Nature” and "the sum total of all creation," has argued consistently in local courts that the current display of the Ten Commandments in public parks must not exclude the viewpoints of other religious groups.

Liberty Counsel, however, denies this assertion, and notes that the current Ten Commandments display was a private donation by an outside group, and thus does not constitute a public endorsement of religion.

“By accepting donated displays, the city did not open a forum for everyone wishing to display a monument in the public park. The city owned the donated displays, and the city could remove, modify, remake or sell any of the displays,” the group said in a statement.

“If the government were required to accept any conflicting message anytime the government spoke through a donated display, then the Statue of Liberty would need to make room for the Statue of Tyranny or perhaps a statue of Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It would not make sense to force the government to include a display devoted to atheism every time it displays a Nativity scene,” the legal group added.

Source: The Christian Post

What the Liberty Counsel doesn't seem to understand — or is it that they don't want the public to understand? — is the fact that the Statue of Liberty represents a viewpoint which the government is endorsing and supporting. You see, when the government is explicitly endorsing a viewpoint, there is no need to accommodate other viewpoints. The government can promote an anti-drug message in schools without inviting pro-legalization activists to give an alternative. The government can hold a "protect the environment" rally without offering equal time to a "trash the environment" message.

So what does this have to do with the Ten Commandments? Well, if the Liberty Counsel wants to the Ten Commandments monument to be treated like an endorsed government message, they are of course free to do so — but do they realize that if that's the case, then the Ten Commandments monument is illegal? By emphasizing the government's control and ownership over the display, they are in effect emphasizing the government's control and ownership over the message of the display. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Liberty Counsel isn't the first Christian Nationalist group to be forced to move in this direction. The American Center for Law and Justice has already admitted — much more openly than the Liberty Counsel — that the Ten Commandments monument in this case is government speech.

This is also why displays of a nativity scene are usually funded and provided by private groups, not the government. Because the government is allowing Christian organizations to erect nativity displays, though, the government must also allow other groups with other viewpoints to do the same — including atheists. The Liberty Counsel if factually wrong on that and they have to know it. This same rule is requires governments to permit Jews to erect displays for Hannukkha.

In other circumstances, the Liberty Counsel is more likely acknowledge that governments cannot endorse the Ten Commandments; that's why they defend such displays by arguing that they are private speech which the government is simply permitting to be expressed on public ground. It seems, then, that the arguments being offered here are incompatible with the arguments they offer in other cases. When trying to protect Ten Commandments monuments from being removed, they argue that the monuments are private speech not controlled by the government; when trying to protect Ten Commandments monuments from being accompanied by other messages, they argue that the monuments are government-controlled displays which the government should be able to present to the public alone.

Imagine if the Liberty Counsel statement said "It would not make sense to force the government to include a display devoted to Judaism or Islam every time it displays a Nativity scene." Bigoted? You bet — but the Liberty Counsel is careful not to express open bigotry towards Jews or Muslims, even though their position permits it. Instead, they are trying to draw anti-atheist bigotry into a case that, curiously, doesn't involve atheists.

Often these church/state cases do involve atheists and that allows Christian Nationalists to play the bigotry card. Here, though, they are fighting another religious group and so had to actually work to find a way to bring anti-atheist bigotry into the mix. I wonder how long it took them to come up with a way to reference atheists in a manner that didn't sound forced. Pity, though, that they could only mange it in a way that was obviously and demonstrably false.