Tennessee Town: 0, Terrorists: 1

Burt Likko 31 Comments

You may recall a bit from a couple weeks ago concerning the cross atop the municipal water tower in Whitesville, Tennessee. I thought the Mayor’s reaction to the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s lawsuit threat misued the word “terrorist,” and the mayor hasn’t stopped calling FFRF “terrorists.” But there won’t be a lawsuit because the mayor has removed the cross. Sort of. He took down one of the two arms of the Latin cross and left the rest up there. The result looks, well, bizarre.

The intent is quite clearly to remind people that once there was a cross up there, and now it’s disfigured. If that doesn’t strike you as a cut-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face sort of maneuver, consider the mayor’s letter to the FFRF lawyer in Nashville:

This brings to close a sad chapter in the history of Whiteville that can best be described as terroristic, cowardly and shameful! The fear and terror caused our older people here is shameful. So shame on your client and your firm!

Really? Mr. Mayor, the town was displaying a religious symbol for the sake of advancing religion. There ought to have been no doubt that your town would have lost the lawsuit. And here’s the thing of it — God isn’t banned from the public square. He just has to get there by way of private speech, not by governmental action. Nothing is stopping you personally from putting a big ol’ cross on the roof of your own house or building a tower to display it. Well, maybe some local zoning laws or building codes, which it seems that you as mayor are uniquely positioned to do something about. There’s really no call to be so childish.

Ah, but that’s addressing the issue on the merits, and of course that’s not really what the mayor wants to do here. He wants to express contempt and spite. And he succeeded. I’m sure his citizens must be proud: after all, he gave in to the “terrorists.”

Burt Likko

Pseudonymous Portlander. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering litigator. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Recovering Former Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.

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31 Comments

  1. So the fact that the symbol is no longer up there is not enough?

    We have to have symbols that don’t remind us of other symbols?

    • Odd, I’m not getting that from Burts post. He appears to indicate that the removal of the symbol has put an end to the lawsuit.

    • Not my point at all. A one-armed cross in this case is a symbol of spite and defiance, not of religion. It no longer proclaims “This town urges you to be a Christian,” but instead proclaims to the world, “We screwed up and we’re only sorry we got called on it!”

  2. I think his solution was pretty clever, actually. Plus it raises an interesting semiotic question — how much of the canonical symbol must be removed before it no longer qualifies as a religious symbol in the eyes of the law? If they had just made one side of the crossbar shorter than the other, would that have been enough? What about rotating the whole thing 90 degrees? What if all the townspeople got together and agreed that this new one-armed cross symbolizes Christianity for them, and then they educated all newcomers that this was the meaning they ascribed to the symbol?

    • Heh. We’re staring right at the notion of “look-and-feel lawsuits” as applied to symbology!

  3. “God isn’t banned from the public square. He just has to get there by way of private speech, not by governmental action.”

    Er, both this and American Atheists v. Duncan involved expressions of religion by private citizens. The issue at hand was the impression that, as the expressions occurred on land that was seen as “state property”, the expressions’ permittance constituted a de facto endorsement of religion.

    Meaning: God is banned from the public square.

    • God is banned from the public square … if it’s the government who tries to put Him there. That last clause is important.

      I suspect where you and I part ways is on the question of the “permittance.” I doubt the the city of Whitesville allows anyone to climb to the top of the water tower and post whatever symbol it wants. I doubt the state of Utah allows just anyone to post whatever they want on the side of a public highway — and it surely doesn’t allow just anyone to use official state insignia on their postings.

      In both these cases there’s something more than “permittance” going on.

      But, nothing stops a preacher from standing on the steps of the courthouse or in front of the doors of the town hall or out in a public park and evangelizing. Nor should it. Nothing stops nor should anything stop missionaries from going door-to-door to invite people to their church. Nothing does nor should stop the Mayor from praying before a meeting of the city council. (During the meeting ought to yield a different answer, if you ask me; that’s crossing a line.) And as we’ve discussed elsewhere and will revisit probably later tonight on this page, nothing does nor should stop a voter from considering religion, if that voter considers religion important, when deciding how to cast her vote.

      • “God is banned from the public square … if it’s the government who tries to put Him there. That last clause is important.

        I suspect where you and I part ways is on the question of the “permittance.” ”

        Well, obviously. I believe that forbearance and endorsement are not synonymous.

        My issue with the UHD’s actions in AA v. Duncan is, I find, the same issue I have with the Bad Boys Bail Bonds guy deciding not to purchase dasher-board advertising but insisting that it’s his First Amendment right to wear a BBBB T-shirt and sit right behind the Sharks’ bench where he’s going to get on TV a lot. It’s an attempt at pushing a message which benefits a specific private organization while pretending that no such benefit will occur.

        • DD,

          If I tried to climb up there and attach a pentagram to the water tower, do you think the city would have shown any forebearance?

  4. That’s one interpretation of the First and Fourteenth, Burt, but I find it dogmatic and unhistorical. And not settled law, or at least not completely settled yet.

    “God is banned from the public square … if it’s the government who tries to put Him there. That last clause is important.”

    Not God. Jesus Christ complicates things, though. Even my pluralistic self would find against “In Jesus We Trust.” That would be an establishment of religion.

    • I’ll cut to the chase:

      Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.

      Epperson v. Arkansas (1963 1968) 393 U.S. 97, 103-104. As I understand your position, while atheism (aka agnosticism, non-belief, non-religion, skepticism, etc.) is within the sphere of individual liberty, atheism is qualitatively different from religion and the Founders placed a premium on the manner in which the religious experience of the individual guided the individual’s participation in the community, so you would have written that passage as:

      Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.

      Have I got that right, my friend?

      • Almost right, yes, Burt. But theism—“ceremonial deism,” in O’Connor’s inaccurate and limp terminology—isn’t anti-anti-theistic. By this I mean that an invocation of Allah need not be regarded as an attack on the divinity of Jesus Christ [although doctrinally, it’s an implicit rejection], and an invocation of the Almighty need not be proscribed by the 14thA as being a violation of the atheist’s freedom of conscience.

        I can’t hang with the notion that the 14thA abolished God, or made unconstitutional the mentions of the Almighty in something like 95+% of state constitutions. This is where Epperson and related cases go off.

        But I do think that Jesus Christ, while permissible under the First at the state level, probably gets taken off the table with the ratification of the 14th, via incorporation. At least I don’t find that interpretation unreasonable.

        But I do not think that the First—under a reasonable view of its first 100+ years in application—equates theism [ceremonial deism, if we must] with “religion,” or the establishment of it. While doctrines like Jesus’ nature were indeed matters of religion, God was regarded by all & sundry as simply a reality.

        And I do not think Epperson and the like are correct to rule 70-odd years later that the ratification of the 14th changed that.

  5. If a private organization puts a cross on a water tower or the side of the road, it’s a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause.

    But when the Westboro Baptist Church stands in the road and says that God killed soldiers because they were faggots and that you can’t stop them because they aren’t on your property, that’s just people exercising their First Amendment rights and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

    So moderate and (relatively) tasteful expressions of Christian faith are banned, but activities that portray Christians in the worst possible light are endorsed. There’s a conspiracy theory in there, somewhere.

    • “If a private organization puts a cross on a water tower or the side of the road, it’s a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause.”

      No it’s not. There are religious billboards all over the place. Hell, in Oregon we have one from a Baptist Church that calls the Pope the anti-Christ.

      • Religious billboards are, presumably, erected on private property. The assertion in this post (and the court decisions is references) are in regards to religious symbols erected by private organizations on nominally-public property (in these cases, municipal service structures or code-mandated easements.)

        • I guess I didn’t mean “assertion” there, but I’m not entirely sure what word I should have used instead.

      • “Hell, in Oregon we have one from a Baptist Church that calls the Pope the anti-Christ.”

        You need to take a picture of that. I have someone who needs to see it.

  6. This brings to close a sad chapter in the history of Whiteville that can best be described as terroristic, cowardly and shameful!

    I feel bad for the mayor. Come December, I’m going to remember him with a nice Happy Holidays card.

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