Atheists, humanists and others seeking to keep God and religion out of President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony will get their day in court.
A D.C. District Court judge announced late Monday afternoon that he will hold a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to strip all religious elements from the Jan. 20 inaugural festivities.
Last week, Michael Newdow, a California lawyer, physician and well-known atheist, led 29 other plaintiffs and 11 organizations in filing a lawsuit to remove the phrase “so help me God” from the presidential oath of office and eliminate the opening and closing prayers from the inaugural ceremony.
The lawsuit contends: “By placing ‘so help me God’ in its oaths and sponsoring prayers to God, government is lending its power to one side of perhaps the greatest religious controversy: God’s existence or non-existence.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he found “good cause” to allow Newdow’s case to proceed, based on the plaintiff’s court filings.
In 2001 and 2005, Newdow filed similar lawsuits but they never went to trial. He is also known for unsuccessfully suing to strike references to God from the nation’s Pledge of Allegiance.
Bob Ritter, a staff attorney for the American Humanist Association, who is joining Newdow in representing the numerous plaintiffs, said he was “happily surprised” to learn the judge would hear the case.
“This is a very momentous lawsuit,” Ritter said. “It is one to protect the rights of all Americans, and we’re confident we’ll prevail. I have had people call this frivolous, but that is not true at all. All of us respect the Constitution and this is a very serious endeavor for the whole country.”
Every president since Abraham Lincoln has added the phrase “so help me God” to the end of the oath of office, and some say the practice dates back to George Washington.
Professor Susan Low Bloch, a constitutional law expert with Georgetown University Law Center, said the case will rest on “standing … whether there is an injury and there is a way in which the court, the law can remedy the injury.”
“It’s a really hard question because historically we have had some reference to God in our public forum for a long time,” Bloch said. “When the Supreme Court opens, it says, ‘God save this honorable court,’ we have ‘God’ on some our coins, we’ve had ‘God’ in other things since our earliest days and there has never been the strict separation of state that these plaintiffs would like.”
