Remember the Forsyth County (NC) prayer case that was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court? If not you can find all kinds of references to it here. In a nutshell the county commissioners were accused of favoring one religion (Christianity) over others because they invited Christian religious leaders to open the commission meetings with sectarian prayers. Some citizens didn't like it and with the help of the ACLU sued the county. The county commissioners, against the advice of the county's attorney, opted to fight it with the help of the Alliance Defense Fund and the financial backing of some local Christian leaders who agreed to pay the legal costs for the county if the county lost the case, which it did.
Lately a few NC counties have opted to continue opening their meetings with sectarian prayers and the ACLU has warned them that they face a fate similar to Forsyth's. That has prompted some state legislatures to draft a bill that would, well, you'll have to read it to believe it. Even if this goes nowhere, which will hopefully be the case, it's still a disturbing development as explained by Lex:
Back when Michelle Goldberg’s book “Kingdom Coming,” about the rise of Christian Nationalism in America, was published, I reviewed it for the News & Record and the blog I then wrote for the paper, The Lex Files. As you can see from the comments, as well as from this site, I took a lot of grief for stating, on the basis of my own reporting on the subject and my familiarity with some of Goldberg’s original sources, that there were significant numbers of people in America who wished to turn this country from a secular, constitutional democratic republic to a Dominionist theocracy; that is, a country where the law is based strictly on the Christian Bible...
Well, as it happens, down in Salisbury, the Rowan County commissioners want to be able to pray to Jesus in their official capacities, and so a bill, House Joint Resolution 494, has been introduced in the N.C. legislature that would allow that and much more besides.
This bill claims that the First Amendment’s ban on government making law “respecting an establishment of religion” applies only to thefederal government, not the states, because in the minds of the (blessedly few) 11 sponsors signing on so far, the Fourteenth Amendment, whose equal protection clause extends the protection of federal law to every citizen of the country, never happened.
It’s tempting to call these people batshit crazy and let it go at that. Tempting though that approach is, however, it lets them off too lightly. This is an attempt to turn one state among 50 in a constitutionally established secular democratic republic into a Dominionist theocracy in violation of the very Constitution the legislators have sworn an oath to uphold.
It's safe to say that this legislative session will go down as one of the most interesting and bizarre in our living memory.
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