ACLU files petition on behalf of witch

TimesDispatch reports The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia has filed a petition on behalf of Cynthia Simpson, a witch of the Wiccan faith, seeking to reverse a ruling that upheld Chesterfield County's decision to bar her from giving the invocation at Board of Supervisors meetings. In its petition yesterday to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU said it has asked the full court to reverse a three-judge panel ruling that allowed government officials to discriminate on the basis of religion when choosing people to pray at their meetings. "Our position is a simple one," said Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. "We cannot find any instance in American jurisprudence allowing the government to officially prefer some religions over others. Indeed, all we can find is the opposite -- repeated admonitions against the government when it discriminates on the basis of religion."

And how many times has the ACLU gone to court to defend the right of a Christian (or a Jew) to be able to conduct a prayer?

In 2002, Simpson, who calls herself a witch, asked to be placed on the list of religious leaders invited to deliver the invocation at county board meetings. She later received a letter from Chesterfield's county attorney that said leaders on the list are restricted to those within the Judeo-Christian faith. Simpson filed suit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. One year later, the Richmond U.S. District Court ruled that the county violated the constitutional mandate for separation of church and state

There is nothing in the Constitution mandating separation of church and state. On Independence Day, 1776, nine of the original thirteen colonies had official state churches. The only mandate is that Congress can't select one faith to be the official religion of the United States.

and discriminated against minority religions. Chesterfield appealed the court's decision. This month, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield's policy fits within the Supreme Court's requirements for legislative prayer. Willis said the ACLU is "hoping that the full 4th Circuit will bring a fresh perspective to this case and strike down Chesterfield's discriminatory prayer policy."

Hilzoy @ObsidianWings blogged Christians spent centuries being tortured and killed because they did not hold the beliefs their governments favored,

The county board did not say that witches should be tortured or killed, just that they could not conduct a prayer before a county board meeting.

and our country was founded by Christians who were not permitted by their government to worship as they believed they should. If Christians are really worried about being 'persecuted', they should hold to the principle of the separation of church and state, since if history teaches anything, it's that no one should count on remaining in the majority forever.

I suspect that there is no single Christian church in the majority in Chesterfield County right now, but they allow people from any Christian church OR any Jewish synagogue to give the prayer.

.... If we're going to allow the state to endorse 'religion', we must either be prepared to endorse all religions, or to have the state pick certain specific religions to endorse. In the first case, we will have to accept prayers by Wiccans. In the second, we will have to give up any pretense that the state is neutral between religions, or that it's not endorsing some specific religion, but 'faith' in general.

Many different churches (and synagogues) are included in "Judeo-Christian tradition"

And we will give up our best protection against the day when our religion, whatever it may be, becomes the religion of an unpopular minority. That protection is the separation of church and state: the view that while individual politicians can and should consider their consciences, and thus necessarily their religious views, in deciding what to do, they should never seek to establish one religion as the official religion of government.

And Chesterfield County has not done that