The city of Boston will pay out $2.1 million in a settlement with a Christian group after the city refused to fly the group’s Christian flag outside City Hall in 2017.
The settlement comes after a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in May that said Boston violated the free speech rights of Camp Constitution, a New Hampshire-based Christian organization, when the city refused to let the group hoist its flag in front of the third flag pole at City Hall Plaza as part of a Constitution Day ceremony in 2017.
The city will pay $2.1 million to Liberty Counsel, which represented Camp Constitution and its founder Harold Shurtleff in the suit. A release from Liberty Counsel says the settlement will go toward attorney’s fees and “costs for the unconstitutional religious viewpoint discrimination of the Christian flag.”
The Christian flag was later raised at Boston City Hall in August.
From 2005 to 2017, Boston approved 284 flag raisings by private organizations with no denials. However, the city official denied Camp Constitution’s application in 2017 to fly the Christian flag on Constitution Day, according to Liberty Counsel.
“The policy stated that the flagpole was open to all applicants, but the city of Boston denied Hal Shurtleff’s application for the sole reason that the application form referred to the flag as a ‘Christian’ flag,” Liberty Counsel said. “Had the application used any other non-religious word, Boston would have granted the request.”
In May’s ruling, the Supreme Court said Boston could not discriminate on the basis of the religious group’s viewpoint without violating the Constitution.
“We conclude that, on balance, Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groups’ flags a form of government speech,” the Supreme Court said. “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.’”
Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said, “We are pleased that after five years of litigation and a unanimous victory at the U.S. Supreme Court, we joined with Hal Shurtleff to finally let freedom fly in Boston, the Cradle of Liberty. The Christian flag case has established significant precedent, including the overturning of the 1971 ‘Lemon Test,’ which Justice Scalia once described as a ‘ghoul in a late night horror movie.’ The case of Shurtleff v. City of Boston finally buried this ghoul that haunted the First Amendment for 51 years.”
In May, the Satanic Temple applied to have one of its flags raised in Boston following the Supreme Court ruling.
“Religious Liberty is a bedrock principle in a democracy, and religious liberty is dependent upon government viewpoint neutrality,” Lucien Greaves, co-founder of the Satanic Temple, previously said in a statement. “When public officials are allowed to preference certain religious viewpoints over others, we do not have Religious Liberty, we have theocracy.”
©2022 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit masslive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Have you ever noticed thar almost everything that this Democrat Party Cult encourages, approves of, teaches and supports is
a Sin or an abomination to God?
To fully advance the Lying, Treasonous, Demonic, Woke, Socialist Democrat Party’s destructive beliefs and agendas is to divide our citizens with hate and promote – racism, open borders, radical feminism, abortion-on-demand, the LGBTQ lifestyle, unfettered sexual identity, transgender, same sex marriage, child indoctrination into sexual confusion and perversions, the pagan Liberal left Democrats must do away with GOD, our Constitution, common sense, morality, Christian values and free religious exercise altogether.
Under the of Disguise of their versions of “anti-discrimination.”
“Religious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power,”
The Christian truths that set men free (Of them ) is viewed by secular people of the liberal socialist agenda as the enemy to be most feared. Living in the image of the great Consumer “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer”
Those Pilgrim ancestors must be spinning out of their graves. Plenty of election turkeys this season. They promis a fish and deliver a stone.
PITY ITS The tax payers ,that in the end, WIND UP Footing the bill for this, WHEN ITS THE LEGISLATURE THEMSELVES< who made this mess.. PITY its not THEM paying out of their OWN POCKETS!