Capitol Visitor Center Religious Language Suit Rejected By Judge

By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) A federal judge has dismissed a suit arguing that engravings of "In God We Trust" and the Pledge of Allegiance at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center here are unconstitutional.

The suit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation was dismissed Wednesday (Sept. 29) by U.S. District Court Judge William Conley of Madison, Wis., due to lack of standing. He said the Wisconsin-based organization did not make a sufficient link between their taxpayer status and the money spent on the engravings that included the national motto and the words "under God" in the pledge.

"Any funds used by the government will necessarily result in the use of taxpayer money," Conley wrote.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative Christian law firm that filed a brief on behalf of dozens of members of Congress seeking a rejection of the suit, hailed the decision.

"This challenge was another misguided attempt to alter history and purge America of religious references," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the ACLJ, in a statement.

The atheist foundation is considering whether it will refile on grounds other than taxpayer standing.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, questioned Conley's decision that there was not a link between a specific appropriation and the congressional resolution permitting the engravings.

"Congress authorized the religious engravings and controls the purse strings for the Capitol architect who had to pay for the engravings," she said in a statement. "How can that not show a 'nexus'?"

Comments

[Pamm Stadt]

09:00 PM on 10/08/2010

First, "In God We Trust",was purely religious. In 1861, Rev. M.R. Watkinson wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase and said,

"One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins."

After a little hemming and hawing by Congress the motto was engraved on our coins in 1874 or there abouts.

A law passed by the 84th Congress (P.L. 84-140) and approved by the President on July 30, 1956, the President approved a Joint Resolution of the 84th Congress, declaring IN GOD WE TRUST the national motto of the United States

And so it came to be. I am wondering how they felt about by-passing the first sentence of the First Amendment. So, as it seems, Christians have been trying to gain a foothold in the government at least since 1861. The fact that our Constitution has remained in tact without another attempt to turn the United States into a "Christian Nation" is, indeed, a blessing.

[Fight4Freedom2008]

02:38 AM on 10/07/2010

It's just that some people need to suck up to their invisible friends. It didn't seem to work out to well during the war, at such time the invisible sky-master started to appear on coins. It didn't all become legal until the fascist struck hard in the early 50's.

Gods and Generals - The Movie Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxPXrrZ8bJU

[TheSojourner]

09:28 PM on 10/04/2010

Do any of you believers realize that "In God We Trust" wasn't originally on our money? That it was added so we could "differentiate" our country from those "Godless Commies"? Do you even know the official motto that was on our money? It was "E pluribus unum" (look it up, it says nothing about God). The same goes for "One Nation Under God", that wasn't originally in the pledge either. Both were added mid 20th century during the “Cold War”; when McCarthy was looking for commies under every rug and in every nook and cranny.

By the way the U.S.S.R. was after power through Communistic means. It wasn’t atheism that fomented the bloodbaths and revolutions. It was sheer lust for power, they didn’t want anything more powerful than the government usurping their authority. That goes for Pol Pot as well. In fact, most of the names brought up as examples of atheists, were all power hungry, lusting for control. Atheism had nothing to do with it. In fact most had some sort of religious backgrounds.

It amazes me how ignorant some citizens of this country are about the basic history of their own land and the world. Yet they're fighting to insist that their ignorance of the facts makes them right by default, somehow. Try looking these subjects up for a change, you might even learn something. Wishing or insisting won’t make it so. To coin a phrase “FACTS IS FACTS”. A Bugs Bunny quote perhaps?

[ghostrider57]

08:59 PM on 10/03/2010

To Mr Sekulow, "under GOD" wasn't added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954. Money didn't have "In GOD we Trust" until after the 1860's.

So, who is altering history?

[bbriani3842]

02:15 PM on 10/03/2010

I always insert an extra "o" in "God" so that it then reads "In Good We Trust". . .

[bbriani3842]

02:12 PM on 10/03/2010

I would like to change that part of the Pledge with

". . .one nation, above any god . . ."

[ArtJunky]

08:39 PM on 10/03/2010

I would like to take the whole thing out the way it put it back to what it used to be before the JESUS people got a hold of it.

[bbriani3842]

02:07 PM on 10/03/2010

D o only good.
O nly consume the resources you need.
G ain knowledge through patient studying and effort.
M ake life a little better for someone everyday.
A uthorities are not the sources of all knowledge -- ask questions. . .many many questions

S et time aside each day to take care of yourself and your sanity.
U se everyday like it will be the last one you will ever get.
C reate a purpose for your life -- ideally, it should leave the world better than you found it.
K nowledge requires patience and effort -- faith requires nothing.
S trive to be an inspiration for others to follow -- not to become a horrible warning.

[creationwaits]

07:44 PM on 10/02/2010

Next, they should sue the National Archives for displaying the Declaration of Independence, and then demand that we resume our allegiance to Great Britain because we illegally broke away because of supposed violation of our "Creator" given rights.

[milanst]

08:16 PM on 10/02/2010

How many times does it say god in the US Constitution? None. The D of I says creator but was written before we were a country.

[creationwaits]

08:32 PM on 10/02/2010

I don't think you can just ignore it - it lays out of justification for becoming our own nation in the first place, after all.

The bigger point I'd like to make, although I haven't the space to fully argue it, is that atheism is inconsistent with the American belief that all men have innate rights that no government may morally violate. Now, you don't need to be a fundamentalist Christian, nor does our nation need to actively build churches or anything like that, but the belief that there is a Creator, and that rights and morality come from Him, is written implicitly into the heart of our style of government. And it's no coincidence that those nations that explicitly affirmed atheism as the truth - communism in the Soviet Union and China being the biggest examples - also trampled on the rights (and often the lives) of their citizens. Those two facts are intimately connected. If rights come from government, government has the right to take them away. If rights come from God, no one has the right to take them away.

You needn't point out that Christian nations have also sometimes disrespected rights, but at least the people could look at their government and say "you are doing wrong, you are violating a higher law." What could an angry atheist say? "I don't like this." So what?

[JeremiahA]

05:59 AM on 10/03/2010

The basic concept was the Declaration of Independence while its manifestation was the Constitution.

And actually God is indirectly and directly referred to in the Constitution. In the date and in the fact the president has ten days to return a bill...Sundays excluded.

The Founding Fathers did not want a theocracy, while also knowing that a democracy could not stand without certain values, namely Judeo-Christian.

[bbriani3842]

02:09 PM on 10/03/2010

It also states, ". . .all men were created equal . . . " and yet. . . .

[kadyak]

05:30 PM on 10/02/2010

Believers are citizens and taxpayers too, and they enjoy the right to exercise freedom of speech too, same as atheists or anyone else.

[milanst]

08:18 PM on 10/02/2010

What does your statement have to do with the above article? The article is about the government promoting religion which is not Constitutional.

[JohnnyKay]

11:15 AM on 10/03/2010

The government can't make laws governing religion, but it is not unconstitutional to promote it.

Fine lines, grey areas.

[Salty two]

06:17 PM on 10/04/2010

What is not Constitutional is for the Gov to establish and force a religion on the people. Publicly displaying " In God we trust does neither.

[LeFlaneur]

01:08 AM on 10/03/2010

When have Christians ever been told they can't speak, worship, practice... they simply don't get special rights and privileges.

[bbriani3842]

02:11 PM on 10/03/2010

Right. . .only gays can. . .

:-)

[milanst]

02:15 PM on 10/02/2010

The new method of rejecting lawsuits that fight violations of the Constitution - standing. This is becoming more and more common. It was the same way they rejected the lawsuit against the use of taxpayer moneys for the advancement of christianity under the "faith based" initiatives that has given money, almost exclusively, to chrisitian organizations that openly discriminate.

[milanst]

02:11 PM on 10/02/2010

One nation under god is divisible!

[MathIsTruth]

10:36 AM on 10/02/2010

I honestly don't understand why any American citizen can't sue the government when it violates the constitution.

The first amendment is pretty clear that the government can't involve itself in promoting religion.  The government is promoting religion in this case. So any of us should be able to call upon the courts to put an end to it.

[Godisfemale]

11:24 AM on 10/02/2010

Which religion does acknowledging God promote?

[MathIsTruth]

02:20 PM on 10/02/2010

All the religions that posit that there is a being known as "God".

Surely you are not suggesting that the First Amendment  only prevents the government from establishing a single religion in its entirety, but allows the government to establish multiple religions or portions of existing religions?

[emmanuel goldstein]

05:22 PM on 10/02/2010

Only Christians call their god God. Muslims call it Allah, Buddhists don't have a god. Then there's the Goddess, who I trust way more than "God".

[nlightenup]

12:32 PM on 10/02/2010

You misread the Constitution.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

That's about establishing a specific religion as "official," as Judaism is the official religion of Israel. There's no prohibition in the Constitution that prohibits government acknowledgment of God or religion.

[Brian Westley]

01:06 PM on 10/02/2010

"There's no prohibition in the Constitution that prohibits government acknowledgment of God or religion."

"The touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the ‘First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion." McCreary County v. ACLU, 2005

[MathIsTruth]

02:24 PM on 10/02/2010

Nope, I read it just fine.

Acknowledgment of God establishes Deism as a religion.

What is the point of the first amendment if the expectation is that people like you will invent loopholes that make it such that we have a religious government?

And more importantly, why would anybody who ever picked up a history book WANT religion in government (unless, of course, it just happened to be that person's religion, and that person loved the idea of being able to dominate others)?

[Etruscate]

10:18 AM on 10/02/2010

Every article about this issue should mention when and why the phrase "Under God" was added to the pledge.

[gevan]

09:22 AM on 10/02/2010

Just swivel that last letter around and "One nation under God" becomes "One nation under Gop"

[LittleRedHenSez]

06:50 PM on 10/02/2010

That's far scarier than the most fervent Jonathan Edwards' sermon. Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

[Uncle Bob]

09:18 AM on 10/02/2010

If this article is supposed to explain the arguments on both sides, it seems to have failed horribly at it. What exactly did the judge base his decision on? The tiny blurb "did not make a sufficient link between their taxpayer status and the money spent on the engravings" doesn't even make sense. Was the judge suggesting the money magically poofed out of thin air...?