Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
Rob Sherman Advocacy scored a huge
victory in federal court, yesterday, by succeeding in getting the context of the
City of Chicago's 9/11 commemorative ceremony changed from municipal prayer
service to secular memorial. Clint Harris, our successful plaintiff in the
Zion City Seal case, is now two for two by winning yet another court battle.
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The key issue had always been context -- would the ordinary observer perceive that the city was engaged in an endorsement of religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. The ceremony, as originally constituted, was blatantly unconstitutional because the Mayor's Office of Special Events had created a prayer service at taxpayer expense. We demanded that the City change the context from religious to secular. We said that the way to do that was to:
Remove Chicago Prayer from program so it would no longer be the centerpiece
Don't use tax dollars to pay cost of printing copies of Chicago Prayer
Don't use tax dollars to distribute copies of Chicago Prayer to the audience
Don't use tax dollars to distribute copies of Chicago Prayer to houses of worship
Don't tell houses of worship what prayers to use in their services
Don't tell houses of worship what rituals to engage in
Don't tell houses of worship when to engage in rituals
Don't tell houses of worship when to be open
Don't coerce public school children to say Chicago Prayer
The City recognized that we were right and they were wrong, and made it clear to Clint and me that they truly wanted to fix the many problems that existed with the original plan. They wanted to fully come into compliance with constitutional provisions for state/church separation. As a result, they would find ways to do everything that we asked for, except remove the prayer from the ceremony. We said that the prayer had to go. They said, "No," so we went to court.
Here's what the City did to address all of our issues other than the matter of the Chicago prayer.
First, the City dropped the Mayor's press release from its web site. The press release had the Mayor engaging in the various egregious conducts referred to in the bullet points, above.
Next, the Mayor's attorneys told the judge and the press that the City and the Mayor no longer embraced those items. The Mayor's web site has all of the Mayor's press releases dating back to 1997, so informing the press and the judge of their new perspective and removing the press release from the web site were significant steps to distance the Mayor and the City from the original plan. They basically did all that they could to fix those particular screw-ups.
Additionally, if copies of the prayer were to be printed and distributed, it would be done privately, at private expense and by private volunteers, with no involvement by the City. As a good-faith bonus, the cost of the entire ceremony would be paid for by a private sponsor. That means that the Rob Sherman Advocacy lawsuit just saved the taxpayers of Chicago a lot of money!
The Mayor's attorneys made it clear that the removal of the press release from the Mayor's web site should be inferred as the Mayor's way of backing away from his statements suggesting to houses of worship when they should be open, what prayers they should say or what rituals they should engage in.
The Mayor's attorneys also told the court, the press and City public school officials that public schools should assure that students are not placed in any situation where a student feels compelled to participate in reciting the Chicago Prayer.
In addition, the Mayor added a disclaimer at the bottom of the memorial ceremony program, assuring that religious viewpoints expressed at the ceremony were those of the speakers, not the government. Again, it's all they could do at this point, so they did it.
All of those steps to distance the city from their previous positions were fine, but didn't address the "centerpiece" problem. The program would still have the appearance of city endorsement of religion and excessive entanglement with religion so long as the centerpiece of the ceremony was a prayer.
The city attorneys then successfully pulled a rabbit out of their hat at the very last minute.
The City came up with a new proposal: They would drop the mass reading of the prayer by the audience in attendance at the Civic Center Plaza. This, they correctly argued, would effectively secularize the ceremony. The prayer would no longer be the centerpiece of the ceremony since it would no longer be a featured component with the special treatment of being the only message that was involved in a mass reading. Instead, it would be rendered to being just another message, delivered by a private citizen or citizens, amongst a variety of secular and religious messages offered by private citizens. Legally and legitimately, that does, indeed, make the memorial a secular public ceremony, so our concerns, therefore, were now fully and adequately addressed, even though the secular ceremony contained secular and legally-permissible private religious messages.
Since the City had succeeded in finding a legitimate way to secularize the program without removing the prayer from the ceremony, an injunction to remove the prayer was no longer necessary.
No injunction was issued, but that doesn't mean we lost. We won! Keep in mind that the Constitution doesn't require that government utilize a Rob Sherman secularization plan. It merely requires that a plan be used that is effective in secularizing government action.
The city took numerous steps to change their ceremony and associated actions from being ones which advanced religion to being ones that were neutral towards religion, just as we had asked them to do. They used their own effective formula to address the centerpiece problem rather than using our formula, but they got the job done, and that's all that counts.
We felt that our formula would have been more effective, but the city's formula got the job done while giving them an opportunity to save face in the face of numerous very embarrassing constitutional gaffes on their part. Our plan would have been more effective, but their plan was sufficiently effective to bring them into compliance.
While the religion-friendly mainstream press is gushing that we supposedly lost, because the judge didn't issue an injunction, the reality is that won a huge victory. The injunction was no longer necessary because of numerous policy changes that we succeeded in pressuring the city into making by filing a lawsuit against them.
We didn't lose. We won. The measure of whether we won or lost is not whether and injunction was issued but, rather, whether our demand to secularize the event was achieved. The City caved in to our demand by secularizing the ceremony in their own way, so we won without the need for injunction.
We won, regardless of efforts by the atheist-hating mainstream press to mock us, as usual.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com