In 1994, along with two other Providence residents and two local booksellers, Ahlburn filed a lawsuit claiming Rhode Island's law exempting Bibles from the sales tax violated the First Amendment. In April of this year, the state supreme court rejected RI's appeal and upheld a 1997 ruling by a lower court overturning the exemption. Believe it or not, the fact that a man of the cloth brought the suit is only half the story. In the original case, District Court Judge Walter Gorman ruled that the law did indeed violate the Constitution's ban of government endorsement of religion, as outlined in the First Amendment. The original ruling stood, albeit under a new marquee.
ROC thinks maybe some clarification is in order.
In the original ruling, Judge Gorman stated that indeed Rhode Island was violating the first amendment on the grounds that the exemption was a government endorsement of religion. Rhode Island appealed the ruling in the state supreme court, on the basis that Judge Gorman had drawn too fine a line between religious endorsement and separation of church and state. The state supreme court upheld Gorman's ruling, with a twist. Instead of ruling that Rhode Island violated the first amendment's religious underpinnings, it ruled that the state had gone against freedom of the press. Because both tenets fall within the realm of the first amendment, the state Supreme Court was able to uphold the ruling, and avoid a second trial.