The ACLJ has taken action, sending a legal demand letter after a local government blocked a church from using a public library’s community meeting room and ordered that the church’s ad be removed from the town newspaper.
The ACLJ has often stepped in to defend churches against policies and actions that exclude them from public spaces. Towns cannot exclude churches because of their religious faith.
Our client is a pastor. He requested the use of the community meeting room of his town’s library to conduct Bible studies for his church and to hold gatherings for grief support. The Massachusetts town policy for the meeting room makes clear that the meeting room is open for the public for informational, educational, cultural, and civic benefit. The meeting room rules also allow people to reserve the room for regular use, for example, a monthly reservation.
Initially, the library director told our client that he could meet for the biweekly time he requested. But then she sent him a follow-up email claiming that, according to “the Town Administration and Legal Counsel,” the meeting rooms of the library can only “be used for occasional events but not for recurring events like bi-monthly Bible studies.” Her statement directly contradicted library policy. Our client sent follow-up letters trying to reserve the room and to figure out whether the library would let him use it at all. But he received no response. At this time, he has still not received any confirmation of any ability to use the space, whether for occasional use or for recurring events.
In the meantime, he also sought to meet with five or six others from the church for a Bible study in the open area of a public park. A local ordinance requires the payment of a fee to hold a “social function” in the park, but a five-person Bible study in the grass is not a social function – it is simply citizens using a park as anyone else can. Our client sent an informational ad to the local newspaper, which agreed to publish the ad about his Bible study in the grass. His ad made clear that this Bible study would not be inside a building like a park gazebo that required a reservation; rather, it asked people to bring chairs and indicated that the regular Bible study would only occur if the weather permitted. In response, rather than clarifying with our client that he was not going to hold an event that required a reservation or communicating with our client at all, the town contacted the newspaper and demanded that the newspaper pull the ad, claiming that “proper approval” was not obtained.
Both these acts are egregious constitutional violations, flying in the face of decades-old Supreme Court precedents. The library violated the First Amendment by prohibiting our client from regularly using the library meeting room, even though the library policy expressly allows people to do so. The library told him that the rules only allowed occasional use of the library meeting room, despite the fact that the meeting room application itself allowed him to select that the use was not a one-time use. And then, further evidencing animus, the library stopped even responding to our client’s requests to reserve a room, whether occasional or not.
This case is reminiscent of conduct the ACLJ successfully challenged more than 30 years ago in Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Sch. Dist., 508 U.S. 384 (1993). In Lamb’s Chapel, the U.S. Supreme Court explained that the “government violates the First Amendment when it denies access to a speaker solely to suppress the point of view he espouses on an otherwise includible subject.” The Court ruled in our favor and held that a public school’s decision to exclude a church from using its meeting spaces to show a Christian film certainly violates the First Amendment.
The same is true of the park. The Supreme Court has emphasized that “streets and parks, which have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions. . . . In these quintessential public forums, the government may not prohibit all communicative activity.” Perry Educ. Ass’n v. Perry Local Educators’ Ass’n, 460 U.S. 37, 38 (1983). Requiring a permit before a small group gathers on the grass of a public park is antithetical to the First Amendment. And ordering a newspaper to remove an ad for a private event is utterly unthinkable.
The ACLJ has demanded that our client be immediately permitted to use the public library meeting rooms under the same terms and conditions that apply to anyone else. We also demanded that the pastor and his church no longer be excluded from public parks because of their religious activity and that the town immediately cease threatening the newspaper for sharing information about a constitutionally protected event. If the town refuses our requests, the ACLJ is prepared to take the case to federal court.
