The judge did not rule on the Constitutionality of the case, simply positing that eliminating the specifically religious parts of a meeting was "viewpoint discrimination."
The case is certainly an interesting one and raises questions about library meeting room policies, especially in light of a case that the ADF earlier lost in a higher court and that the Supreme Court has refused to visit in spite of a supporting brief from the Bush Administration:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,214929,00.html
In this case, the court ruled "Prohibiting Faith Center's religious worship services from the Antioch meeting room is a permissible exclusion of a category of speech."
So, the issue seems to be whether a meeting is a religious service (which seemingly may be disallowed in library meeting rooms) or a meeting discussing religion that might contain so many religious elements that it may as well be a religious service. It would be nice to get a unified legal ruling on this issue. In the meantime, libraries will evidently have to look at their policies to see what they want to allow and what they don't. We may owe our taxpayers a rigourous separtaion of church and state, so that tax dollars to not support religion in our meeting rooms; on the other hand, we have always been advocates of free adn open expression. An interesting dilemma. Any thoughts?
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Some patrons stop and pray (I think to Allah) in the Gahanna branch by kneeling and bowing. We haven't interupted them or asked them to leave over it that I know of.
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