CSN - Citizen Voice - 5/3/2022
Tuesday Bulletin
Today’s Citizen Voice is focused on the Supreme Court of the United States. SCOTUS challenges are in the news this week. We conservatives have a lot to be thinking about!
In one case, they have admonished the city of Boston for allowing groups of all sorts to raise a flag, for a time, on a flag pole designated for private groups EXCEPT a ‘Christian’ flag. Hal Shurtleff, a co-founder of Camp Constitution, and a writer who has made previous contributions to Citizen Voice, provides a brief introduction to the news release from Liberty Counsel of the case that led to a 9-0 decision by the court to protect their free speech rights.
We are also including a video from Good Life Broadcasting featuring Matt Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, explaining about the Camp Constitution case against the City of Boston for refusal to fly the Christian flag above City Hall. It also includes an interview with Hal Shurtleff, who explains the situation.
Additionally, everyone has heard by now about the leak of the SCOTUS draft opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade. If you haven’t kept up with the news, it involves a leaked draft document from inside the Court that expresses an opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade. Progressives may try to pressure the Supreme Court to uphold Roe V. Wade. Of course progressives will go crazy if Roe v Wade is decisively overturned and will likely apply political pressure to the greatest degree possible. They would use this as a rallying cry to motivate their base to turn out for the election in November. The far Left’s work to politicize the Supreme Court has been out in the open. From personal attacks on conservative nominees to the court, to attempts to pack the court, adding additional justices to tip the balance of the court toward their progressive cause, the Left continues to openly strive to have SCOTUS use their decisions to legislate new laws that the US House and Senate will not pass.
Keep an eye on the SCOTUS and enjoy the CV today and share it with others. We need all citizens to understand what the Left is doing to undermine our nation.
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U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Rights in Camp Constitution case
Offered by Hal Shurtleff of Camp Constitution
May 2, 2022
I received a call today at 10:30 AM from Roger Gannam, one of the attorneys at Liberty Counsel who has been involved with our lawsuit from the very beginning. He informed me that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in our favor 9-0. Since then, I have conducted a batch of media interviews. First, I want to give God the Glory. His Hand was in this case from the beginning. I want to thank the folks at Liberty Counsel that did an incredible job, and all of the people who support and make Camp Constitution possible. The main mission of Camp Constitution is to teach people the U.S. Constitution. I think that this issue has given the nation a good lesson on the 1st Amendment. Below is the news release from Liberty Counsel announcing the decision.
SUPREME COURT HEARD RELIGIOUS VIEWPOINT CASE
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the City of Boston violated the Constitution by censoring a private flag in a public forum open to “all applicants” merely because the application referred to it as a “Christian flag.” The High Court stated that it is not government speech, and because the government admitted it censored the flag because it was referred to as a Christian flag on the application, the censorship was viewpoint discrimination, and there is no Establishment Clause defense.
Justice Breyer wrote the opinion in which Chief Justice Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion. Justice Alito filed a concurring opinion in the judgment, in which Thomas and Gorsuch joined. Justice Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion in the judgment, in which Thomas joined.
In Shurtleff v. City of Boston, Liberty Counsel represents Boston resident Hal Shurtleff and his Christian civic organization, Camp Constitution. Shurtleff and Camp Constitution first asked the city in 2017 for a permit to raise the Christian flag on Boston City Hall flagpoles to commemorate Constitution Day and Citizenship Day (September 17) and the civic and cultural contributions of the Christian community to the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, religious tolerance, the Rule of Law and the U.S. Constitution.
The High Court wrote that “Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groups’ flags a form of government speech. That means, in turn, that Boston’s refusal to let Shurtleff and Camp Constitution raise their flag based on its religious viewpoint ‘abridg[ed]’ their ‘freedom of speech.’”
“We do not settle this dispute by counting noses—or, rather, counting flags. That is so for several reasons. For one thing, Boston told the public that it sought ‘to accommodate all applicants’ who wished to hold events at Boston’s ‘public forums,’ including on City Hall Plaza. App. to Pet. for Cert. 137a. The application form asked only for contact information and a brief description of the event, with proposed dates and times. The city employee who handled applications testified by deposition that he had previously ‘never requested to review a flag or requested changes to a flag in connection with approval’; nor did he even see flags before the events. Id., at 150a. The city’s practice was to approve flag raisings, without exception. It has no record of denying a request until Shurtleff’s. Boston acknowledges it ‘hadn’t spent a lot of time really thinking about’ its flag-raising practices until this case. App. in No. 20–1158 (CA1), at 140 (Rooney deposition). True to its word, the city had nothing—no written policies or clear in[1]ternal guidance—about what flags groups could fly and what those flags would communicate,’” the Court wrote.
In addition, the Court wrote, “Here, Boston concedes that it denied Shurtleff ’s request solely because the Christian flag he asked to raise “promot[ed] a specific religion.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 155a (quoting Rooney deposition). Under our precedents, and in view of our government-speech holding here, that refusal discriminated based on religious viewpoint and violated the Free Speech Clause” (emphasis added).
There are three flagpoles outside City Hall that fly the U.S., Massachusetts and Boston flags, plus a fourth flag on Congress Street, which runs parallel to City Hall. For 12 years from 2005-2017, Boston approved 284 flag-raisings by private organizations with no denials on the flagpoles that it designated as a “public forum.” Had the flag been referred to as anything but Christian, the city would have approved it. The flag itself was not the problem; it was the word “Christian” describing it in the application that was the issue. The year before Camp Constitution’s application (2016-2017), Boston approved 39 private flag-raising events, which averaged three per month. In 2018, Boston approved 50 private flag raising events, averaging nearly one per week. One included a flag of a private credit union.
The Justices commented on the longstanding test known as the “Lemon Test” which has been used to determine if a law violates the First Amendment. Its name comes from Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the Court ruled that a Rhode Island law that paid some of the salary of some parochial school teachers was unconstitutional. This test has proven to be unworkable and has led to inconsistent and contradictory decisions on the constitutionality of 10 Commandment monuments and cross monuments like the “Peace Cross.”
Justice Gorsuch, joined in a concurrence with Justice Thomas, stated, “It’s time to let Lemon lie in its grave.”
Justice Gorsuch continued, “How did the city get it so wrong? To be fair, at least some of the
blame belongs here and traces back to Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971). Issued during
a “‘bygone era’” when this Court took a more freewheeling approach to interpreting legal texts, Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 8), Lemon sought to devise a one-size-fits-all test for resolving Establishment Clause disputes. That project bypassed any inquiry into the Clause’s original meaning. It ignored longstanding precedents. And instead of bringing clarity to the area, Lemon produced only chaos. In time, this Court came to recognize these problems, abandoned Lemon, and returned to a more humble jurisprudence centered on the Constitution’s original meaning. Yet in this case, the city chose to follow Lemon anyway. It proved a costly decision, and Boston’s travails supply a cautionary tale for other localities and lower courts. The only sure thing Lemon yielded was new business for lawyers and judges.”
“Ultimately, Lemon devolved into a kind of children’s game. Start with a Christmas scene, a menorah, or a flag. Then pick your own “reasonable observer” avatar. In this game, the avatar’s default settings are lazy, uninformed about history, and not particularly inclined to legal research. His default mood is irritable. To play, expose your avatar to the display and ask for his reaction. How does he feel about it? Mind you: Don’t ask him whether the proposed display actually amounts to an establishment of religion. Just ask him if he feels it “endorses” religion. If so, game over,” wrote Gorsuch.
In his concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “A government violates the Constitution when (as here) it excludes religious persons, organizations, or speech because of religion from public programs, benefits, facilities, and the like.”
In his concurrence, Justice Alito wrote, “I agree with the Court’s conclusion that Boston (hereafter City) violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech when it rejected Camp Constitution’s application to fly what it characterized as a “Christian flag.” But I cannot go along with the Court’s decision to analyze this case in terms of the triad of factors—history, the public’s perception of who is speaking, and the extent to which the government has exercised control over speech—that our decision in Walker v. Texas Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., 576 U. S. 200 (2015), derived from Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U. S. 460 (2009). See ante, at 6–12. As the Court now recognizes, those cases did not set forth a test that always and everywhere applies when the government claims that its actions are immune to First Amendment challenge under the government-speech doctrine. And treating those factors as a test obscures the real question in government-speech cases: whether the government is speaking instead of regulating private expression.”
Justice Alito continued, “But courts must be very careful when a government claims that speech by one or more private speakers is actually government speech. When that occurs, it can be difficult to tell whether the government is using the doctrine “as a subterfuge for favoring certain private speakers over others based on viewpoint,” id., at 473, and the government-speech doctrine becomes “susceptible to dangerous misuse….To prevent the government-speech doctrine from being used as a cover for censorship, courts must focus on the identity of the speaker. The ultimate question is whether the government is actually expressing its own views or the real speaker is a private party and the government is surreptitiously engaged in the “regulation of private speech.” Summum, 555 U. S., at 467…. Consider first “the extent to which the government has actively shaped or controlled the expression.” Ante, at 6. Government control over speech is relevant to speaker identity in that speech by a private individual or group cannot constitute government speech if the government does not attempt to control the message. But control is also an essential element of censorship.”
Liberty Counsel’s Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “This 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court strikes a victory for private speech in a public forum. This case is so much more significant than a flag. Boston openly discriminated against viewpoints it disfavored when it opened the flagpoles to all applicants and then excluded Christian viewpoints. Government cannot censor religious viewpoints under the guise of government speech.”
TIMELINE
SEPT 2017 Liberty Counsel sends Boston demand letter following flag application denial.
JULY 2018 Original suit filed in district court.
AUG 2018 Court denies preliminary injunction.
JUNE 2019 First Circuit affirms the denial.
JULY 2019 LC files motion for summary judgment in district court.
FEB 2020 District court denies LC summary judgment and grants city’s summary judgment.
JAN 2021 First Circuit affirms summary judgment for city.
JUNE 2021 LC files writ of certiorari at SCOTUS.
SEPT 2021 SCOTUS takes the case.
JAN 18, 2022 Oral argument set at SCOTUS.
BRIEFS OF LIBERTY COUNSEL AND CITY OF BOSTON
Reply Brief For The Petitioners
Petition for Certiorari
Opposition to Petition for Certiorari
Reply Brief in Support of Petition for Certiorari
Brief for Petitioners Camp Constitution
Brief for Respondent City of Boston
Reply Brief of Petitioners Camp Constitution
Hal Shurtleff, Director Camp Constitution http://campconstitution.net/mission-statement/
From Good Life Broadcasting: Episode 29: Standing Up for Judeo-Christian Values - 12/12/21
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To take up your watch! Become a Citizen Sentinel! Stand in Service for Freedom!
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TAKE ACTION > Help the J6 Political Prisoners -
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SIGN IT> Sign The Petition - KICK PLANNED PARENTHOOD OFF CHRISTIAN CAMPUSES! Petition the Presidents of Christian colleges with ties to Planned Parenthood or that promote abortion
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Remember, an educated and enlightened citizenry is vital for our future. As it has been written:
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"If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." ~ Samuel Adams, 1776
Ownership of our Republic is now the fight of our time! Keeping our Republic depends upon the genuine sense of ownership of the Land of the Free. Either this is our country, or it will belong to those who are actively seeking to take it from us. It is the same mentality that inspired someone long ago to express the sentiment that “All it takes for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.” Efforts to take responsibility for keeping this nation a free Republic are organically occurring right now all across the nation.
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Recommended Resources - follow the links…
Excellent Election Education Resource: US 2020 Election Fraud at a Glance
Excellent Non-Partisan Election Resource: Election Integrity Project California
Excellent Constitution Education Resource: LIBERTY TREE ONLINE UNIVERSITY
Excellent Citizen-Patriot News Resource: Steve Bannon's War Room
Excellent Citizen-Patriot News Resource: From Frank Speech - the Home of Free Speech
Excellent Citizen Comprehensive Resource: David Horowitz Freedom Center
Excellent Citizen Activist Resource: Precinct Strategy: Home
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https://ed-exit.com/
Excellent Expose’ of Political Prisoners within the US: American Gulag
Excellent Guide to Protecting Families: A Guide to Protecting Your Family From the Coming Insurrection and Violence 1 ARE YOU SAFE?
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