Texas Gov. Greg Abbott submitted a legal memo to the state Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday erroneously insisting that Christian crosses may be legally displayed on sheriffs’ vehicles. The governor is interfering in a controversy resulting from the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s official complaint letter about this unconstitutional practice by the Brewster County Sheriff’s Office, which recently added Latin crosses to its patrol cars.
Government officials such as Abbott, and sheriffs like those in Brewster County, took an oath of office to uphold our Constitution. But, apparently, they need a reminder that it is an entirely secular document. The Constitution does not recognize a god, much less the Christian one, and its only references to religion are exclusionary.
Abbott is governor of all Texas citizens, not just Christians. So it’s dismaying that his brief assumes Brewster County has a Christian “heritage.” Not so. Individuals may be religious, but counties have no religion. When public officials use their official capacity to promote their personal religion, they are violating the law. FFRF’s complaint was not over an individual sheriff who had a personal cross around his neck, or a sheriff placing a cross on a personal vehicle, but over the department officially aligning itself and its officers with religion, in this case Christianity.
Such governmental speech and action sends a chilling message that the department itself enforces Christian doctrine, instead of civil law, and further signals that Christian citizens are the insiders, while non-Christians and nonbelievers are outsiders.
The absence of religious symbols from official sheriff vehicles would not, contrary to Abbott’s claim, express “hostility to religion.” Governmental neutrality is the appropriate viewpoint. A sheriff should not care about the religion of citizens or suspects, but about enforcing the law evenhandedly and protecting citizen rights.
Abbott attempts but fails to reconcile the government displaying exclusively Christian symbols on its property with the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which protects citizens from religious endorsement by the government. Rather than addressing the considerable body of Supreme Court case law condemning religious endorsement by the government, including by the placement of crosses on governmental property, Abbott mischaracterizes the Supreme Court as having an “expansive interpretation of the Establishment Clause’s limited and unambiguous test.”
Abbott’s goal is clear: to pander to his religious constituents by being seen as a modern-day crusader for the Christian cause. His memo to the Attorney General’s Office is anything but a fair and objective legal analysis. FFRF hopes that when the attorney general issues his own opinion, he will set aside political considerations and stick to interpreting the law.
FFRF has a national enrollment of 23,000 members, including almost 1,000 individuals in Texas.
