Court: NYC Can Ban Churches from Schools

Overturning a lower court ruling, a federal appeals court ruled that New York City can ban churches from using public school facilities for Sunday worship services.

I personally didn’t know that churches used public facilities but, according to the article at Fox News, I guess it happens more than a little.

There seems to be three reasons that the court used to overturn the ruling and ban churches from using public school facilities, according to Todd Starnes.

1) It’s unfair to other religions.
Because Christian churches worship on Sundays, letting them use the schools on that day is unfair to the religions that worship on weekdays when the school is not available. “Jews and Muslims generally cannot use school facilities for their services because the facilities are often unavailable on the days that their religions principally prescribe for services,” Judge Pierre Leval declared. “At least one request to hold Jewish services (in a school building used for Christian services on Sundays) was denied because the building was unavailable on Saturdays. This contributes to a perception of public schools as Christian churches, but not synagogues or mosques.”

According to that logic, any organization like a chess club that regularly meets on weekdays could protest and say that it’s not fair that other organizations like basketball teams can use the school on weekends. That’s just idiocy.

2) Churches are discriminatory. Christians churches kinda’ want Christian members so therefore they’re discriminatory.

“Bronx Household acknowledges that it excludes persons not baptized, as well as persons who have been excommunicated or who advocate the Islamic religion, from full participation in its services.” Leval wrote.

So Christian churches don’t allow Muslims. Uhm, why would they?

Now, following the logic here if the basketball teams that use public school facilities held tryouts and only allowed the best players on their teams shouldn’t they too be disqualified from using public schools because they discriminate against bad basketball players. In fact, I happen to recall my high school football team cut me for being 5 foot 2. How about that for discrimination? Can I sue?

3) People are stupid and the court has to protect them from stupidity.

The judge says that people would see worshiping going on at a school and become instantly convinced that the government had now established a religion throughout the land.

The judge wrote: “In the end, we think the board could have reasonably concluded that what the public would see, were the Board not to exclude religious worship services, is public schools, which serve on Sundays as state-sponsored Christian churches.”

Because, you know, when people see basketball teams playing in public school gyms on weekends they automatically assume that basketball is now mandated by the government to be played by all and anyone who can’t play will be punished or deported.

Let’s just cut through the manure here, all right? This is just another way to drive Christianity from the public sphere. In this case, the court isn’t treating these Christian churches as it would secular organizations. So therefore the court is clearly discriminating against Christian organization. Let’s hope this anti-Christian edict gets overturned.