Higher powerCourt: Kentucky can continue to credit God for homeland security

The Kentucky Supreme Court has declined to hear a challenge to a state law that mandated the commonwealth give credit to God for its homeland security.

Since the case was declined, the Supreme Court will let the Kentucky Court of Appeals’ split decision stand.

NKY Cincinnati reports that there were two related law that were passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The first law was a 2002 “legislative finding” which stated: “the safety and security of the commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

The second act, passed in 2006, required the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security to publicize dependence on “Almighty God” in agency training and educational materials as well as a plaque at the entrance to its emergency in years since.

The plaintiffs sued in 2008 saying that the laws violated constitutional bans on state-sponsored religion. Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate agreed, ruling that the state had “created an official government position on God.”  

The Court of Appeals later reversed that decision and upheld the law, stating it “merely pays lip service to a commonly held belief in the puissance (power) of God” but does not advance religion.

The national legal director for American Atheists, Edwin Kagin, said he was disappointed with the Supreme Court not to review the case. “What’s really frightening about this is it’s increasingly clear that these people (proponents of such legislation) want to establish the Christian religion, and they’re getting more and more blatant about it all the time.” he said.

Kagin plans to discuss his options with his clients, which could include dropping the matter entirely or bringing the case to the federal court system.

NKY notes that the problem for Kagin is that when the case hit the Court of Appeals, virtually every legislator in the state, as well as the attorney general and the governor, expressed themselves in favor of the law.

In the Court of Appeals ruling, only Senior Judge Ann O’Malley Shake was against the law. Shake thought Wingate was correct in saying the legislation has an “impermissible effect of endorsing religion because it was enacted for a predominantly religious purpose and conveyed a message of mandatory religious belief.”

The Court of Appeals compared its decision regarding the 2006 law with a federal appeals court’s 2001 decision not to reject legislation establishing a state motto which read: “With God, All Things Are Possible.” The Kentucky Court of Appeals said the federal appeals court’s ruling was in harmony with a long history of “all three government branches recognizing the role of religion in American life.”

Judge Shake was OK with the Ohio motto, saying “passive aphorism that places a duty upon no one,” but said that the law passed by the Kentucky legislature requires the state’s homeland security director to be “stressing to the public that dependence upon Almighty God is vital.”