Colo. Library Allows Religious Debate
A district northwest of Colorado Springs is allowing religious debates to take place in its public libraries. In the Rampart Library district, citizens are now permitted to hold religious speeches in public libraries after Liberty Counsel
A district northwest of Colorado Springs is allowing religious debates to take place in its public libraries.
In the Rampart Library district, citizens are now permitted to hold religious speeches in public libraries after Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based group campaigning to open public spaces to religious speeches, filed a law-suit against the library district.
“I think it represents an attempt to be open and renegotiate what the public realm is for,” says Wilfred McClay, a humanities chair at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.
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The library rewrote its meeting room policy in order to allow a wider range of uses, including religious speeches about marriage as the union between a man and woman, to occur in its meeting rooms.
The lawsuit against the Rampart Library district is one of six litigation cases across the nation filed by the Liberty Counsel. Thus far, Liberty Counsel has won in every case, causing the libraries to change their meeting room policies to allow religious speeches.
Besides the Rampart Library district, Liberty Counsel has also changed the library meeting policy in Abilene, Texas; Dunedin, Fla; Pensacola, Fla.; Portage, Wis; Charleston, S.C.; and West Allis, Wis.
Matthew Staver, the president of the Liberty Counsel, comments that the purpose of the legal proceedings is to protect religious expression as stated in the constitution.
Liberty Counsel is known to be a socially conservative group and has a history of supporting Christian itineraries such as the ten commandment monument in Texas and opposing same-sex marriages in several states.
