OPINION:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is cheering a recent federal court ruling that allows atheists the right to deliver invocations before local government meetings, same as if they were just another pastor or preacher or priest or true man or woman of God.
Of course they’re cheering. Atheist rabble-rousers always cheer when they’re able to ram their ridiculous suits through court and win — when they’re able to mock God and those of faith in the process.
The obvious question here is why would the FFRF want the right to pray in the first place, given that its members are, well, atheists?
And the just-as-obvious answer is this: They don’t.
Atheists don’t really want to deliver pre-meeting invocations — commonly defined as appeals to a higher being. They just don’t want those of faith delivering them.
So to confuse and confound, it’s off to court they go, where they can declare their offensiveness at having to listen to utterances of God, and clamor for similar First Amendment expressions of religion — or no religion, as the case may be.
Doesn’t matter. Potatoes, potahtoes.
The FFRF makes the case that invocations are actually secular by nature — religious by choice. And as such, they say, they ought to be legally able to participate.
The actual case?
The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida just struck down the Brevard County Board of Commissioners’ ban on non-theists from delivering pre-meeting invocations.
The plaintiffs in the suit, along with the FFRF, included the Central Florida Freethought Community, the Space Coast Freethought Association, the Humanist Community of the Space Coast, and a single solitary Brevard County resident named Ronald Gordon.
FFRF’s co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor crowed, post-ruling: “We’re delighted such blatant discrimination against nonreligious citizens has been struck down. Governmental bodies that open their meetings with invocations must not turn believers into insiders, and nonbelievers into outsiders, by excluding dissenting points of view.”
What a crock.
Invocations are appeals to God — prayers. Atheists don’t pray. The fact a court’s found that they can not only mocks common sense, but it also makes a mockery of those of faith, and of God Himself. Not that atheists care about that last — because, once again, atheists don’t pray.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.