Unanimous Supreme Court rules in favor of Christian flag
The City of Boston so clearly violated US law on religious liberty that a normally divided US Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the city on May 2.
At issue was a flagpole owned by the city. The city offers civic groups the opportunity to fly their flags briefly on the pole to encourage civic engagement. Yet when a conservative Christian group called Camp Constitution applied to fly its flag—which is widely known as the Christian flag—city officials denied the request, citing the religious nature of the flag’s “speech.”
The case, Shurtleff v. Boston, strikes at the heart of a favorite rallying cry of religious conservatives, the belief that they are denied free expression of their beliefs. But it also drew the attention of more traditional church-state separationists who believe Boston’s particular policies did not adhere to federal law and were therefore discriminatory.
