Judge Rules Maine School Committee Discriminated Against a Church
A federal judge ruled Friday that the Hermon School Committee violated a church's First Amendment rights when it refused a year-long lease of school space.
The facts come first below. My opinion follows in the section marked as opinion.
A federal judge ruled Friday that the Hermon School Committee discriminated against an evangelical church when it rejected a request to rent high school space on a yearly basis for Sunday services, the Bangor Daily News and the Maine Wire reported. In a written decision dated Nov. 13, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance E. Walker of the District of Maine found that the committee's treatment and denial of The Pines Church's application for a year-long lease violated the church's rights under the First Amendment and Maine's public accommodations law.
Walker did not order the school system to grant the longer lease. He denied the church's request for an injunction, awarded The Pines Church and its lead pastor, Matt Gioia, $1 in nominal damages, and said the plaintiffs may seek reasonable costs and attorney's fees, according to the opinion and both news reports. The Bangor Daily News said the committee had voted 4-1 to offer a month-to-month lease rather than a 12-month or six-month term. Walker's opinion recounts that after a motion was called, Jesse Keith, Karen Shorey, Stephanie Oiler, and Haily Keezer voted in favor, and only Christopher McLaughlin voted against it. The next day, Gioia told Superintendent Micah Grant it was "hard . . . not to connect the dots" between questions about the church's beliefs and the decision to offer a month-to-month lease instead of the requested one-year term. The judge wrote that the month-to-month offer "appears to me to have been an offer designed to be rejected not one born of wholesome support for the Free Exercise Clause."
Gioia moved his family from Colorado to Maine in the summer of 2020 to start a church, the opinion says. He was born in Waterville and grew up in Guilford before joining the military at 17. The Pines Church first met in his home, then began Sunday services in March 2021 at a movie theater in Orono under a month-to-month lease. The Maine Wire said the congregation still rents space on a month-to-month basis at Spotlight Cinemas in Orono and is attended by around 150 people. Gioia met Keezer, a School Committee member, at a barbecue, and she suggested he inquire about renting Hermon High School. School policy made short-term use a principal's decision and a long-term lease a matter for the School Committee, the judge found. The committee took up the request at its Dec. 12, 2022, meeting.
Walker wrote that, in other words, "if a public school's facilities are available for public use, a religious organization cannot be denied access to those facilities because it is a religious organization." He also wrote that the Free Exercise Clause "bars even 'subtle departures from neutrality' on matters of religion." The arrangement the church sought was new for Hermon, he said, but "novelty is not a basis to discriminate against religious organizations." He found it more likely than not that discriminatory animus toward the church motivated the denial of the year-long term, and that at least three members - Oiler, McLaughlin, and Shorey - exhibited "bad motives." The proceedings, he wrote, had "undertones and overtones of bad motive" that went beyond the practical concerns the committee cited.
McLaughlin, the only member who voted against any lease, asked "intrusive" questions about the church's denomination and its views on diversity, equity and inclusion, abortion, and sexuality, the judge found, a point also reported by the Bangor Daily News. Oiler's attitude toward the church was "anything but neutral," Walker wrote, and was made more obvious by "protesting far too much that this was not about the Church but instead fear, for example, of mass vomiting epidemics and the platoon of janitorial assistance that would be required to mop it up." Grant, whom the Bangor Daily News described as a self-described born-again Christian, had supported a year-long lease and repeatedly told the committee that renting the space would not amount to an endorsement of the church. Walker wrote that the record was replete with examples of Grant acting as a "guardrail" whenever the committee started to drive the process into a "constitutional bridge abutment." The same religious-freedom fight, in another form, was visible this week when Open Doors delivered a million-signature petition to Downing Street.
Opinion:
Once a public school opens its auditorium to the community, it cannot close the door to a church because officials dislike what that church teaches about life, marriage, or the Scriptures. Equal access is not an establishment of religion. It is the opposite of picking favorites. Walker said the law plainly. A month-to-month offer designed to be rejected is not neutrality.
One dollar does not put The Pines Church in the high school on Sunday morning. The injunction was denied, and the congregation is still in a rented theater. What the court did do is tell a Maine school committee, after a trial, that religious identity was a substantial factor in the denial and that curiosity about a pastor's views on abortion and sexual morality is not a license to treat a church as a problem. School boards should take their own lawyers' advice. The Constitution still knows the difference between endorsing a pulpit and letting a congregation rent a room.
