Federal Court Says You Can't Shut Up Churches

From Mirrors of Justice

Here's Judge John Noonan, writing a few months ago in the Canyon Ferry Road Baptist Church case:
An unregulated, unregistered press is important to our democracy. So are unregulated unregistered churches. Churches have played an important — no, an essential — part in the democratic life of the United States. . . . In a secular age, Freedom of Speech is more talismanic than Freedom of Religion. But the latter is the first freedom in our Bill of Rights.

I am always wary of people that try to use legal means to shut people up. Short of not allowing a paper to publish how to produce a nuclear bomb in ten easy steps I look at such attempts with a skeptical eye.

I think looking back a lot of folks would say that perhaps the numerous criminal statutes outlawing the passing out of communist literature was not the best thing to do. Likewise I don't see how freedom is advanced by Screaming Separation of Church and State when the main motive to get opinions out of the public square you don't like to hear.

Good Opinion.

Oh and it gets more damning. After talking about the history of religion in the slavery debate and Civil Rights struggle he Judge says:

Is it necessary to evoke these historic struggles and the
great constitutional benefits won for the country by its
churches in order to decide this case of petty bureaucratic
harassment? It is necessary. The memory of the memorable
battles grows cold. The liberals who applaud their outcomes
and live in their light forget the motivation that drove the
champions of freedom. They approve religious intervention in
the political process selectively: it’s great when it’s on their
side. In a secular age, Freedom of Speech is more talismanic
than Freedom of Religion. But the latter is the first freedom
in our Bill of Rights. It is in terms of this first freedom that
this case should be decided.