ACLJ Helps Library Protect First Amendment Rights of a Crochet Group Meeting in the Library and Discussing Religious Views

The ACLJ has scored a win for the First Amendment. Our usual cases involve lawsuits against governments. Whether federal, state, or local, it is our responsibility to hold governments accountable for their violations of the First Amendment. For example, we recently helped a church challenge a library’s decision to exclude religious groups from their meeting rooms, as that decision violated the First Amendment. But this time, we were able to help a library in Alabama correct a constitutional violation. With our legal help, the library has corrected the actions of a librarian who had prohibited religious speech and put a policy in place to prevent similar situations from happening again.

We represented the vice chair of the board of a public library in Alabama. A crochet group meets regularly at the library, where its members crochet and discuss various conversational topics without limitation in subject matter, just freely discussing their views as members of the public. But when this conversation turned to religious viewpoints, someone was offended and reported it to a librarian. The librarian, as a result, informed the crochet group that they could not talk about religion because it was offensive. The leader of the crochet group was told that if religion were brought up again, to just change the subject. When she resisted this, she was also told that if the group did not comply, it would no longer be permitted to meet in or use the library.

When the library board found out about this, the entirety of the board was rightly upset at what had happened in their library. However, not being lawyers, the board was not sure whether the librarian had done the right thing or not. Many of them, including the chairman of the board, were prepared to resign rather than allow such a decision to happen under their authority. The vice chairman of the board realized that they needed legal help, so he contacted us.

We explained to him that the librarian’s conduct had violated the First Amendment. It is unlawful for a public facility to treat religious groups differently or less favorably than non-religious groups with regard to access to meeting spaces. It is likewise unlawful for speech to be excluded from a public forum because of its religious viewpoint. To ban or limit groups from using the library to speak of religious issues is unconstitutional. When a public library makes its meeting rooms available for use by the public, it creates a designated public forum under the First Amendment and is prohibited from engaging in content or viewpoint discrimination.

These principles are not novel for us. In Lamb’s Chapel, we won a major victory as the Supreme Court unanimously held that a school district violated the Free Speech Clause when it excluded a private group from presenting films at the school based solely on the films’ discussions of family values from a religious perspective. Even though the government can justify some reasonable restrictions on the forums it creates, it cannot justify allowing all views of an issue “except those dealing with the subject matter from a religious standpoint.”The same principles apply here.

Our client relayed the legal advice we gave and used it to clarify the law to the board and to explain to the librarian why what she did was inconsistent with the Constitution. The librarian, having been confronted with the law, recognized that what she said was inconsistent with the First Amendment and could not happen again. Moreover, the board decided to put in place a new policy in order to ensure that a similar situation could never happen in the future. They are taking the First Amendment principles that we explained to them and using them to put together a new policy for the use of library policies, ensuring that the First Amendment rights of those who use the library are protected from infringement.

We are thankful for this victory and that this library board did the right thing and corrected this mistake, implementing a policy to ensure the First Amendment is respected. In many circumstances, governments are not willing to recognize their mistakes and try to ignore their obligations under the First Amendment. We need your ongoing support in all these legal battles.