Written by Don Byrd
If you walked through the Florida State Capitol Rotunda last year, you may have asked yourself that question. Alongside the Nativity Scene and the Menorah, visitors received holiday greetings from a festivus pole made of beer cans and a pile of googly-eyed noodles presented by Pastafarians, a group claiming to worship a deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This year, a lawsuit may be filed by a “Satanic Temple,” demanding inclusion of their display.
How did this happen? Why would government-hosted holiday displays contain not only religious and secular holiday themes, but groups ridiculing religion as well?
Writing at Slate Magazine, Mark Joseph Stern winds through recent Supreme Court precedent in an attempt to answer this question. He places the blame squarely on Court rulings that chipped away at the wall separating church and state, leaving this rubble behind.
Here is his description of the fallout from the 1994 Rosenberger decision, in which the Court held that a state university could not withhold funding for a student religious publications that it provided to other non-religious publications.
When Rosenberger first came down, many liberals bemoaned it as a loophole through which Christians could obtain more government funding. It may well be—but it’s also the Satanic Temple’s best shot at getting its display in the Florida Capitol. State officials claim that, because they were generous enough to open up the space to religious groups in the first place, they retain the final authority over who gets to display what. Rosenberger says: absolutely not. If officials didn’t want the Satanic Temple erecting a display in the capitol rotunda, they shouldn’t have let religious groups in in the first place. Now that they’ve opened the gates, they have no right to stop the stampede.
I don’t agree with every detail of Stern’s characterization of the cases or the state of the law, but his general point is well-taken: Be careful what you wish for. Finding reasons to justify government’s hosting and funding of religious displays of any kind brings consequences. Those same arguments are available to non-Christians, too. Perhaps anti-Christians as well.
