The First Amendment, in its wisdom, protects all kinds of speech and religion. Yes, even ones you don’t agree with.
It’s all protected: from baking a cake or protesting war at school to burning the American flag or reimbursing parents who sent their kids to religious schools for public transportation funds. We don’t have to like flag desecration, be pacifists, agree with religious bakers, or support religious schooling, but the Constitution allows for this all, and that’s the glorious nature of the Bill of Rights.
Yet, one left-wing group wants to sabotage it all. Enter the so-called Freedom From Religion Foundation, the message of which will appall most conservatives.
The group takes the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which bars the state from establishing a formal government religion, extremely far, and the group protests any kind of intersection of religion into public life, even a whisper. The group advocates essentially not just that the state can’t establish a formal religion, which is true, but that the government must be anti-religion and actively atheist.
I like to keep an eye on the radical group and am often tipped off to some over-the-top thing it is doing to protest America’s religious roots. It looks like on Valentine’s Day, of all occasions, the Freedom From Religion Foundation did not disappoint.
While the group often protests religion in the public square, it’s a bit rare for the organization to challenge a state legislature’s invocation, something most legislatures do as a nod to the nation’s religious roots. Not only that, but the group’s reason for objecting is so subjective, it could hardly cite a single legal case to support it.
Here’s the video of the supposedly offensive prayer in West Virginia’s state legislature. You can also see the super adorable students from the West Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind who happened to be there that morning. While the Freedom From Religion Foundation will occasionally file a lawsuit complaining of a violation of the separation of church and state, this time the group wrote a letter describing the group’s disdain.
As First Liberty attorney Jeremy Dys told me, there seems to be a concerted effort, a lobby of sorts, to rid the state of any mention of religion at all. He wrote in an email:
Of course, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has the First Amendment right to do this all it wants, even though it’s nonsensical and disingenuous. In this case, I’m glad the group didn’t file a meaningless lawsuit meant to do nothing more than clog up an already drowning legal system.
These anti-religion groups are frustrating in light of the First Amendment because their right to hate religion is protected by that very constitutional provision they twist and campaign against.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
