Interview with Linda Stephens
Conducted by Tom Beasley for Episode 112.
Listen
Transcript
B: I’m happy to welcome to the show, Linda Stephens, one of the plaintiffs in the recently decided case of Town of Greece v. Galloway, that found city council religious invocations before town meetings to be Constitutional. Mrs. Stephens, glad to have you, how are you doing today?
S: I’m fine, thank you for asking me.
B: Now, most people don’t understand the timeline of Supreme Court cases - this started a long time ago, right? I think it was back in 2008 you first filed?
S: Work started actually in 2007 and yes, the lawsuit was filed in 2008.
B: That’s quite a long timeframe for you to have to wait to get a final answer.
S: This has been a whole learning experience for me because I didn’t know that much about the Federal court system and it’s been a real educational experience. I knew cases took a long time but I didn’t realize how long.
B: Right. How did you first get involved in all this?
S: Well, in the town where I live, the town of Greece [New York], we got a new town supervisor. Before he came into office, at the town board meetings, they began with a moment of silence and when the new supervisor came in he decided to initiate having a prayer to start the town board meetings. He did additional things that I disapproved of, I thought he was trying to dismantle the wall of separation between Church and State in our town here. He did things like hold prayer services on January 1st every year, he started participating in the National Day of Prayer, he started giving money to one of the local churches to put on a Fourth of July celebration and the more and more of these things he did, the more and more angry I got I guess.
B: Right.
S: At one of the town board meetings a woman from outside the town came about an issue completely unrelated to this prayer business and she had been raised Jewish and she was at that time a Unitarian and she sat there in the audience. The pastor was introduced as “Christian Pastor” and he delivered one of his sectarian prayers and she was appalled. She started talking about it and the local press picked up on the issue and so it got in the newspapers and that’s when I read about it and I decided this is an opportune time to maybe do something about this whole issue, so, that’s how I got involved in it.
B: I see.
S: What I did was I joined the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, we have a local chapter in Rochester, so that was the beginning of it I think.
B: What sort of thoughts did you have going forward at the start when you started the legal case and started getting all this together?
S: I started reading the A.U. newsletter and reading up about similar cases across the country. I saw if I actually got involved in a lawsuit that maybe we had a good chance of changing what was going on. I learned to my distress (laughs) that that wasn’t going to be the case.
B: Well you actually had some victories along the way, isn’t that right? You actually succeeded in the high court of your state?
S: Right. We lost at the district level in Rochester and then we appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City and they ruled for us and then the Alliance Defending Freedom, the town got the A.D.S. to represent them and so the town appealed it to the Supreme Court, so that’s how we ended up in the Supreme Court.
B: Now, for the listeners that don’t know, the U.S. Supreme Court can choose which cases it takes and that’s called a Writ of Certiorari, now when the U.S. Supreme Court granted your cert, were you apprehensive about that, were you nervous? What did you think your prospects should be?
S: We really didn’t want to go to the Supreme Court because we knew the conservative makeup of the Supreme Court and we had a victory in the Court of Appeals and we knew that the chances of getting a really good victory were slim. We were apprehensive.
B: How did you feel about oral argument and as the case went up did you keep that apprehension? Did you see the writing on the wall as things were developing?
S: Well, you always hold out that maybe the Court will give us some sort of narrow victory, that’s what our lawyers were hoping for but that did not turn out to be the case.
B: Were your attorneys very helpful throughout the whole proceeding?
S: Yeah, they were very good. You know, they were very experienced. Ayesha N. Khan, who’s the head of the legal department at Americans United was the one that, did the bulk of the work on this case along with Richard Katskee was an attorney on the A.U. legal staff at the time - while all this was going on, he did move on to another job but early on he worked very closely with us. They were very good, very competent.
B: How is the reaction in your town going through this? Did you find that other people were bonding together with you, did you get animosity toward you? What happened with that?
S: It was mixed. There were a lot of letters to the editor when all of this came out in the local newspapers and people wrote supportive letters and angry, angry letters. I did receive some unpleasant things along the way - Susan and I both received threatening letters telling us to stay away from the town board meetings, that was one thing. Then, I had vandalism to my house: one night someone came in the middle of the night and dug up my mailbox and the next morning I found it on top of my car, so that was a little unsettling.
B: Wow.
S: I had vandalism in my backyard and after the Supreme Court decision came down I had some interesting run-ins with people. We have a large mall in the town of Greece and I was up there right after the decision came down. A man came up to me and he said: “ Are you the person I saw in the newspaper?” and I said “Probably” ‘cause I had just been on the news and been in the newspaper with my name and picture, and he was incredulous and he said, “ You don’t believe in prayer?” He just couldn’t believe it, and I said, “ Well, no I don’t, I have many views, I also believe in the Separation of Church and State” and he was very, very angry and he threw up his arms and stalked off and I tried to call him back because I wanted to talk to him a little more but he wasn’t hearing it, so that was one thing. Then I had a bad reaction from one of my next-door neighbors: I was out in the backyard and he was out in his yard and he walked down the sidewalk alongside my property, slowly, and then he came back very slowly and he yelled out “It’s a great day in the neighborhood for prayer!” and he kept on walking back to his house so I think that was — he’s a gentleman with a lot of religious paraphernalia in his backyard so I think he was happy about the court decision I think.
B: Right. That sounds pretty awful and I’m sorry especially about the vandalism and feeling of safety. What were some of the examples of support you got from the community?
S: Well, we have a local chapter of the ACLU and they had a well-attended program with debaters, it was co-sponsored by the Federalist Society in downtown Rochester and there was a really large attendance on it. They had an ACLU lawyer debate this case along with a lawyer from the Alliance Defending Freedom and a lot of people came up — Susan was there too, and a lot of people came up and complemented us and said nice things to us.
I’ve been involved, since I was retired, the local chapter of NOW, the National Organization for Women, and of course all of the people who belong to that particular group, you know, believe the same way Susan and I believe about this issue. My friend, after this came out in the paper, I had far-flung friends in Florida that I grew up with; she called me at seven o’clock in the morning which she never does, the phone rang at seven o’clock in the morning and she was excited and said, “Linda, I just opened my newspaper” - she takes the Daytona Beach newspaper, and she said, “ Your picture is on the front page of the Daytona Beach newspaper!” And I’ve had calls from a good friend that lives in Georgia saying the same thing and Michigan, I’ve had friends from all over call.
B: You talked about how you were apprehensive of this court, when you look at the ruling, the majority, all five of them I think are Catholic, and I think there’s one Catholic in the minority - it seems that it really was cut down, the Supreme Court really made this decision based on their religious ideologies, that’s how it seems to me. How do you feel about that, doesn’t that seem kind of unfair to you?
S: It is unfair and, Sunday I think it was, in the New York Times, there was a really good article by the reporter that reports on the Supreme Court decisions and he was analyzing what’s happening to the Supreme Court now: it’s not just religious, you know, it’s not just separation of religion, it’s also political beliefs, you know? He was saying if it keeps going like this people are going to lose faith in the courts because so many of these important decisions seem to depend on whether you’re a conservative Republic or a liberal Democrat. He said that’s not good when people think, “If I go before the Supreme Court, my case is not going to be decided on the merits of the case it’s going to be decided on politics.” The reporter went into how these Supreme Court justices get their news: Scalia listens to talk radio - you can imagine what talk radio he listens to, probably Rush Limbaugh and that crowd, and he refuses to read the New York Times, so he gets his news from very conservative news media outlets, that’s not good.
B: I think those are all very good points. We’re talking about political alignments and it’s a little bit fuzzier when you look at [Justice] Kennedy, because I think a lot of people were looking at Kennedy in this case, as they typically do, and thinking, “ Well maybe he’ll come out on the proper side of things” (is what I would call it), and — when he gave his majority opinion did you think — how did you find the opinion? Did you think the opinion was discriminatory, did it not set well with you? What was your opinion about the opinion?
S: It was discouraging because our lawyers’ strategy [that] the one Justice we have to persuade was Kennedy and … it didn’t work. It was discouraging, the things that he wrote. One thing I remember, he made it, for cases involving children in prayer, he buys the idea that children can be coerced into praying and whatnot but in the decision he wrote, this time, he just dismissed the idea that adults can be coerced, which is ridiculous really, because adults can be coerced, there’s been research studies on the subject. And when you’re in a Greece town board meeting, very few people generally attend these meetings and so, if you refuse to go along with what the pastor is asking you to do up in the front, the pastor stands at a podium, facing the audience, and some of these pastors will ask you stand, they’ll ask you to bow your head. I remember one time a pastor asked the audience to say the Lord’s Prayer, recite the Lord’s Prayer and in back of the pastor on a dais including the Chief of Police, the town’s attorney, the town board members, the Supervisor, and all of the people who work in the different departments, so they’re looking out at you, down at you, and out at you, so if you don’t stand up and say the Lord’s Prayer or you sit there and you refuse to pray, you’re going to be noticed, you’re going to be made to feel uncomfortable or an outsider — it’s a bad situation.
B: The minority, the dissenting opinion, doesn’t seem to really care much about this coercion element so much as the principle of the separation — did you find that at least someone ‘got it’ on the Court, that you had at least someone who understood where you were coming from?
S: Elena Kagan — the liberal people on the Court understood it: during the oral arguments, I think it was Elena Kagan, was the first one to interrupt the lawyer that was speaking at the time and she did that by taking one of the actual prayers that had been said by one of the pastors in one of the town board meetings and then asking the Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer if that would - I think she asked him if that would be suitable to begin a Supreme Court session and he had to say ‘no’ because it was so sectarian, so obviously offensive to people who weren’t of that particular, really conservative faith.
B: Wow. That’s pretty compelling. And, actually, with these prayers that began the town council meetings, this had happened for quite a while and my understanding is that they made this argument that, ‘Oh, well, we just sort of let prayer, let people come in and do prayers, we’re not necessarily enduring Christianity’ but my understanding is that for a very long time it had been only Christians doing these invocations, is that right?
S: Yeah, for about ten years I think it was. The only reason things changed a little bit, a tiny little bit, was when they were threatened with the lawsuit and, it was after the lawsuit was filed I believe and they wanted the town board members — his next door neighbor was Jewish so he invited his next door neighbor in, and his neighbor read from a Jewish book — he was not a Rabbi or anything — and when it got out in the papers and people in the community read about this and it turns out there was a Bohiam [?] group and one of the Bohiam [?] pastors contacted the town and asked if he could come in and give a prayer and he was allowed to do that one time and a Wiccan who lived in town and she read about it in the papers and she called and asked if she could say a Wiccan prayer and she got a lot of blowback.
B: Really?
S: One of the prominent businessmen in the town, right after she gave the prayer, he wrote a letter, a very angry letter, to our local newspaper, the Greece Post, saying if they were going to allow Wiccan prayers then we might as well do away with this business completely. I think she got other blowback too because she never requested to do another prayer and she was never invited back.
B: Wow.
S: And the thing — the supervisor would tell the media, ‘ Anybody can come in and give a prayer if they want’ but the thing is he never informed the residents who lived in the town of this, the only people he informed were the media and the Court. He — we have a new supervisor now — the old supervisor had a quarterly newsletter that he could’ve put something in about this. He had a website that he could have put it in — as a matter of fact one of the Justices, maybe it was Kennedy, asked the ADF lawyer if the town supervisor would be willing to put it on the website that anyone could give a prayer and the ADF lawyer said he didn’t know if the supervisor would want to do that or not. It was so obvious that the supervisor did not want - you know, the supervisor wanted to continue what he was doing, he wanted Christian prayers all the time and he wasn’t eager to have diversity so that’s why he didn’t tell anybody who lived in the town.
B: It seems to be hard even if the supervisor was on board with it because of the discriminatory, sort of hostile responses from the community anyway.
S: Right, well that’s the big reason that, or that’s the difficulty with the outcome of this court case is that now if we want to make things better what’s gotta happen is atheists have to come out of the closet, you know, this is one problem with atheists is so many of them are in the closet, and they have to step up to the plate and go in there and, you know, say, ‘Alright we’ll give an atheist invocation’ and as a matter of fact, I belong to a group in Rochester it’s called the Atheist Community of Rochester, and one of the people who belongs to this group has asked the new town supervisor if he could give an invocation … it was approved, so, the first ever atheist invocation is going to be done at the July town board meeting, so we’re kind of excited about this. The end result of this case has made atheist and humanist groups begin initiatives on how to deal with this whole situation for example the Freedom From Religion Foundation has initiated a contest, I think it’s called ‘Nothing Fails Like Prayer’, I think that’s what it’s called, and they’re going to give a prize. They’re going to have an annual contest. They said they’re going to have this contest every year until Town of Greece v. Galloway is overturned and they’re going to afford the winner of the contest - whoever, in order to win this contest, you have to give a prayer of invocation before a government meeting, a sectarian prayer or an atheist prayer, so that should be interesting. And the American Humanist Organization announced they were going to something right after the Supreme Court decision. They have initiated this program where they’re going to train people to do secular invocations and they have a website devoted to it now where they give samples of sectarian invocations and they have advice about how to construct one. They have a database of people around the country who are willing to do this, so that’s another thing that’s happening. Things are happening.
B: That sounds good. You think that atheists can turn this into a positive experience then?
S: Well, we’ll see. A positive experience for … (laughs) we’ll see. This is interesting: I was on a local PBS TV program, ‘Need to Know’ it’s called, in Rochester, and the new town supervisor was also asked to participate in this along with a college professor from Nazareth College who teaches history and religion or something. During the interview the supervisor remarked that he was receiving all of these calls from all over the country about people wanting to do prayers at the Greece Town Board and he said some of them are very strange, he said ‘I got one from a man who wanted to pray to spaghetti’. Of course, we probably all know who that is, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He didn’t seem too thrilled about that. It’s going to be interesting I think.
I read about a Satanist is demanding to say a prayer, it’s not locally but, I forgot where it was — one of the things the Supreme Court ruling says is you can’t discriminate against, you know, you can have your Christian prayers, sectarian prayers but you have to allow other people too, you can’t maintain your discriminatory procedure from here on in.
B: Right, absolutely. It seems to me like people are okay with having diverse religious ceremonies so long as it’s different kinds of Christians.
S: Oh yeah.
B: Or different variations and sub-sects of that, and it’s not okay when it’s Flying Spaghetti Monsters and Satanism and Wicca.
S: I know. And we have a fair number of Muslims that live in the Town of Greece. When it’s bad weather I go up and walk in the mall, when it’s not bad weather I walk outside in one of the parks, so I see what people are in the Greece town mall and you see lots and lots of Muslim women in their Muslim dress. As a matter of fact, I went to one town board meeting and the audience was — there must have been a dozen or a dozen and a half Muslims there and they had come to request [that they] open a Turkish cultural center in the town of Greece and so they had to sit through these Christian prayers.
B: Right, specifically Christian too. It seems weird to me [that] the Separation of Church and State is good to everybody, it’s good to religious people, it’s good to non-religious people. What do you think the hurdle is in people understanding that?
S: Well, some of these conservative pastors, their line is that the Separation of Church and State just has to do with protecting the church from the state and so they send out that message and they put it in letters to the editor and everything, that’s a hurdle. That’s why organizations like Americans United are so important because they help educate people about what church/state separation is really about.
B: Right. Well, I really appreciate all that you’ve gone through with this whole court case, it must have been a very long ordeal and I think that more people need to step up and be active like you have, and I really appreciate it.
S: Absolutely, it’s very important. I think atheists need to follow the example of the LGBT community; when people get to know you and know you’re an atheist and see you’re not a monster, that makes things better and they’re more willing to accept change. That’s what we have to do I guess.
B: Absolutely. Thank you for joining us Linda, Linda Stephens, one of the plaintiffs in the Town of Greece case recently decided and thank you for joining us.
S: Alright, thank you.