(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) The Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in Shurtleff v. City of Boston, a case in which the Boston City Hall refused to fly a Christian flag outside its building, despite having flown a rainbow LGBTQ flag during Boston Pride Month, Conservative Brief reported.
Boston city officials said they cannot fly the white, blue, and red Christian flag because doing so would constitute a government sponsorship of religion and violate the First Amendment‘s Establishment Clause.
Plaintiff Hal Shurtleff, who is being represented by Liberty Counsel‘s Mat Staver, filed a request that the city fly the Christian flag in 2017 as part of its 12-year tradition of raising flags on behalf of organizations.
His lawyers argued in the lawsuit that Boston had not denied a single one of 284 petitions to fly a group’s flag prior to Shurtleff’s request.
Boston’s lawyers said that the city does not consider the flagpole a public forum but a government-owned method for supporting certain groups.
“‘The flagpole that stands prominently at the city’s seat of government is the means by which the city communicates its own messages,’ Boston’s lawyers told the Supreme Court. “The city uses it as a bully pulpit and has not turned it over ‘to private parties as a forum to pronounce their own messages.'”
Boston’s lawyers thus admitted that the city supports the woke religion, with its LGBTQ sexual morality, its doctrine of original white guilt, and its belief in sanctification through dismantling white supremacy.
The city’s argument has even failed to convince the far-left American Civil Liberties Union.
“When the government opens its public property for private speakers, it has to treat everybody equally,” said David Cole, ACLU national legal director
“This case is really about private citizens’ access to government property to express themselves,” he said. “And that access is critical to our ability to speak to each other, to express our views and the like.”
The Freedom From Religious Foundation condemned the Supreme Court for reinterpreting the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which the American Founders did not intend to prohibit state governments from supporting Christianity.
They called the Christian flag, with its red cross, a white supremacist and nationalist symbol.
“While this case is objectively about Boston’s flag policy, it appears that the Supreme Court, entrusted to enforce the First Amendment and our godless Constitution, fully intends to issue a ruling, however narrow its grounds, that would force an American city to fly a Christian flag over its city hall,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president.
“The idea that the U.S. and Massachusetts flags would fly in tandem over Boston City Hall with a Christian nationalist symbol would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago,” she concluded.
