Judge orders VA cemetery to allow JesusA federal judge slapped down the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Thursday, saying it can't stop a pastor from using the words "Jesus Christ" in his Memorial Day invocation at Houston National Cemetery.
"The government cannot gag citizens when it says it is in the interest of national security, and it cannot do it in some bureaucrat's notion of cultural homogeneity," U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes wrote in his order, granting the Rev. Scott Rainey's motion for the court to intercede. "The right to free expression ranges from the dignity of Abraham Lincoln's speeches to Charlie Sheen's rants."
Rainey, lead pastor at the Living Word Church of the Nazarene, asked Hughes to prevent the cemetery's caretaker, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, from telling him what he can say in a prayer on Memorial Day after the agency asked him for the first time to submit the prayer for review. >>>
Rainey's prayer, less than a page long, includes the recitation of the Lord's Prayer and closes with one reference to Jesus: "While respecting people of every faith today, it is in the name of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, that I pray. Amen." >>>
"It's private speech that happens to be on public land," said Hiram Sasser, Rainey's attorney. "The Supreme Court has said on five occasions that the government has no business censoring religious private speech on public land or in a public venue."
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The creeps of the federal government who seek to remove faith from any 'government' facility or event is reminiscent of the Soviet Union. This was a Judeo-Christian nation the let other faiths to be practiced without Federal intervention. It was never meant to prevent the public practice of a faith in anyway.
