The Bible, according to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is so dangerous it may actually “endanger your health and life.” That’s right, the radically anti-Christian organization thinks the Bible should even have a skull and crossbones warning label, much like for hazardous materials.
The latest faux controversy began when FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor came to the Northern Illinois University to give a speech. While staying at the University’s Holmes Student Center Hotel, she and her husband, FFRF co-president Dan Barker, were shocked to find a copy of the Bible in their room.
They found its presence “obnoxious,” “inappropriate and unconstitutional,” given it was in state-run lodging. Even more ludicrous was their claim that they were “proselytized in the privacy of their own bedrooms.” Now, they’re trying to ban Bibles in public hotel rooms.
They consider their cause to be an “important consumer complain, much like asking for smoke-free rooms.”
More absurd, however, is that the university actually caved, even though it was not the one to officially place them there to begin with, they merely allowed a Christian group, the Gideons, to leave it in their rooms. Moreover, no one is ever forced to pull the Bible out of the nightstand drawer and open it, much less read it.
The ACLJ, which is urging public hotels not to ban the Bible in rooms, also points out the group is dead wrong on the law, too:
FFRF claims the Bible should be banned because they find it “obnoxious.” Yet, in reality, the Supreme Court has stated just the opposite. It hasheldthat adults should be able to withstand “speech they find disagreeable,” without imagining that the Establishment Clause is violated every time they “experience a sense of affront from the expression of contrary religious views.” By extension, requiring the elimination of Bibles in hotel rooms owned by public universities would, as the court has found in other contexts, “lead the law to exhibit ahostility toward religion that has no placein our Establishment Clause traditions.”
There is no coercion. There is no proselytizing happening here. Instead, it’s once again clear that those holding themselves out to be freethinkers are threatening smaller institutions with constitutional claims that would fall flat in court. FFRF is in the business of making threats because they know that any time they go to court, they always lose.
The Constitution is not on their side. And with these latest shenanigans, neither is common sense.
The FFRF has failed over, and over, and over again in courts. Sometimes just giving up really is the right thing to do.
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