Court Opinion

ID: 9478563
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:52:09.860578+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:29.763014
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join the court’s opinion. City of Chicago sets the standards in this circuit, and in light of the grant of review in County of Allegheny it is unnecessary for us to revisit the subject. I do not, however, abandon the views expressed in dissent in that case, 827 F.2d at 128-40. As Judge Coffey’s separate opinion today shows, the use of religious symbols has long been a part of government and remains so today. If Christmas may be a holiday — that is, if states may celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ — it is difficult to condemn the government’s display of a nativity scene together with the other symbols of the day. The creche depicts the event that the day commemorates. That this symbol has religious meaning is obvious, but once we admit the holiday (mounted at great expense in holiday pay for all civil servants), the display of symbols pales. Christmas has acquired a secular meaning (it celebrates shopping, the national pastime, as well as generosity) while retaining its religious meaning. The Constitution does not simultaneously allow the state to declare a holiday in honor of this religious event and command it to pretend that the day has only secular meaning, or allow it to sponsor a display but compel it to hold the icons at a symbolic arm’s length by moving them to the other side of the street. If there may be a holiday, and a display, at all, there is no constitutional virtue in the ten-foot pole. Governments display the appropriate symbols for other occasions; the holiday celebrating the life of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., brings readings from his sermons, unabashedly sectarian in nature. When the government speaks but does not compel others to worship or penalize those with different views, there is no serious threat to religious freedoms.