GAZETTE COLUMN: THE WRECKING BALL by John P. Flannery

The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors compromises the Courthouse Green

There they go again. Our Board of Supervisors can't help itself.

We have another in your face - "you're not as religious as we are" - December moments. I'm talking about our Board's assembly of preferred religious symbols on the courthouse grounds to the exclusion of others.

These Supervisors are the same people who would insist the problem with America is that we don't abide by the U. S. Constitution. Yet it is so very hard for our Supervisors and their learned counsel to read and abide by the First Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits the establishment of religion.

So they decided to pick a list of religions and say, implicitly, who can be offended by that? One practical answer is every other religion that was not included. But the right answer should be everyone including the included.

Today in Loudoun County we choose several religions to honor and advocate, tomorrow, we choose one, and then we choose a sect of one religion. This was President Thomas Jefferson's concern, that there would be warring sects and whichever prevailed would dictate what the nation must believe.

Years ago, my wife Holly and I visited Bali, a more beautiful place in the world is hard to imagine. Religious symbols abound. The entrance ways to homes are studies in religious meditation. The Bali government, however, requires its citizens to identify themselves by one of three specified religions, Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. I asked, "What if I am a Jew?" The answer was, "Well, then you'd identify yourself as Christian." I said, "But that's not Jewish!" My respondent shrugged.

What if this was the forced choice in America? No doubt some anti-Semites would be pleased with the exclusion of Jews but find it disconcerting to highlight and endorse or "establish" religions that were not Christian. There's the rub when government prefers and chooses one or several religions as permissible.

We don't believe our Board misunderstands the First Amendment. We believe instead they are imposing their religious views on the community - a very un-judaeo-christian thing to do as I read the scriptures, not to overlook that it's also extra-legal and unconstitutional.

The Board has tried some sleight of brand in support of constraining our individual rights and liberties. They have had the gall to say that they were allowing for the exercise of free speech. But a government advocating for and establishing religion is not free speech. Nor is the speech contemplated by another phrase in the First Amendment "free" when the government authorizes what may be said, purposefully excluding what else might be said. The freedom of speech is an individual and personal freedom enjoyed by the people, not by the government, and rebels against the controlling and channeling of such righteous exertions by the government as the Board is doing in our fair county.

Some say, "what's the big deal?" This is oft said by those unaffected by the unconstitutional constraint - in the past, for example, those who didn't have to sit in the back of the bus. It is by tolerating such offenses against individual rights, even when we are unaffected, a kind of "das macht nichts" (it doesn't matter) approach, that we all lose our rights by not so subtle degrees. For next time, the incursion may be about "your" rights.

In the category of calling the kettle black, we have Leesburg Supervisor Ken Reid, the most formidable aspirant to the intolerant-as-a-bed-bug designation, currently held by the orange-hatted Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio, for calling atheists, "terrorists." When called on it, caught at it, Supervisor Reid gave some iteration of I-misspoke-intolerantly and I should have used better code to communicate my real biased thinking to those that agree.

Supervisor Reid's spoken aloud sentiments reveal his unconcealed bias that no person may embrace the uncertainty of life and say he or she disbelieves in a divinity that has a Judaeo-Christian origin. The "terrorism" of which Supervisor Reid rails is the dissenting belief system that conforms not at all with his own. The specific objection that he made was against atheists who would express these views on a court house lawn that Supervisor Reid had declared sacred to certain specified religions for a season that our Board has chosen.

Supervisor Reid's confessional gaffe instructs us as to the true meaning of this array of select religious symbols on the civic space to the exclusion of others that represent belief and unbelief systems that the board did not select and that the Constitution assures are protected.

Perhaps next year the abundant private venues all around our court house grounds will suffice to allow each person to celebrate what he or she chooses to express without interference by public officials who swore to uphold a Constitution that they'd rather violate instead.