January 14, 2005
THIS PRAYER'S FOR YOU:
Judge denies atheist's lawsuit to prevent prayer at Bush inauguration (SAM HANANEL, January 14, 2005, Associated Press)
An atheist who tried to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance lost a bid Friday to bar the saying of a Christian prayer at President Bush's inauguration.U.S. District Judge John Bates said Michael Newdow's claim should be denied because he already had filed and lost a similar lawsuit at a federal appeals court in California last year.
Bates also said Newdow had no legal standing to pursue his claim. Even if Newdow could show he had suffered injury because he was offended in hearing the prayer, Bates said the court did not have authority to stop the president from inviting clergy to give a religious prayer at the ceremony.
Mr. Newdow must be a secret theocrat, establishing these legal precedents for official religious observances by the State. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2005 4:34 PM
OJ: We should send him a thank you card. This dower, angry, wingnut is an ideal poster child for the Tolerance(tm) of the Left.
Posted by: John Resnick at January 14, 2005 5:17 PMword has it he lives on an annual "grant" from the Department of Education -- worth every sent; if he had a PayPal account, I'd pay to keep him going
Posted by: JimGooding at January 14, 2005 6:25 PMSilly judge. I had assumed that our vibrant, flexible, living, evolving (sorry), morphing, and otherwise comprehensively elastic Constitution, buttressed by Justice Breyer's deep bows to sophisticated European opinion, was widely recognized as conveying a right not be offended by anything other people might do.
Posted by: Axel Kassel at January 14, 2005 10:05 PMWhy are the secularists so easily offended? I know they are on a mission to save humanity although I've never been able to figure out why or from what? Is there not something pathological in the fervor of Mr. Newdow?
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at January 15, 2005 10:04 AM