by Jorge Gomez • 3 min read
National Park Service officials in Virginia are saying that a religious group isn’t allowed to hold a special mass ceremony in a park cemetery.
This week, First Liberty and the international law firm McGuireWoods LLP sent a letter to National Park Service officials at the Poplar Grove National Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia.
We’re urging them to allow the Knights of Columbus to hold its annual Memorial Day Mass in the cemetery, where it has been held annually since at least the 1960s.
But for the first time last year and again this year, the NPS denied the Knights a permit to hold the service in the cemetery, citing a new policy that designates “religious services” as prohibited “demonstrations.”
“Due to the religious nature of the Knights’ annual service to honor and pray for the nation’s fallen soldiers, they have been assigned a second-class status and relegated to the proverbial back of the bus,” said First Liberty attorney Roger Byron. “That is precisely the kind of unlawful discrimination and censorship the First Amendment was enacted to prevent. Surely, this decision was an oversight.”
“Our hope is that the National Park Service will immediately correct this error and grant the permit,” said John Moran, Partner at McGuireWoods. “This policy and the decision to block the Knights of Columbus from continuing their long-standing religious tradition is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
In America, government cannot disfavor faith-based organizations and gatherings simply because they’re religious. In fact, under the First Amendment and other federal law, religion and religious groups receive favored treatment and protection.
As we explain in our letter, “The Supreme Court has recognized that restrictions on religious expression often violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment…The NPS’s prohibition of the Knights’ Memorial Day service due to its religious nature is not merely unlawful content-based discrimination on speech—it is textbook viewpoint discrimination, which is per se unconstitutional.” Further, “it violates the [Free Exercise Clause] and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to discriminate against and censor the Knights’ activities solely because of their religious character.”
The most sensible thing to do—indeed, the right thing to do—is for NPS to approve the permit for the Knights to hold its Memorial Day Mass, which is a historically significant and commemorative event. Instead of being canceled, religious groups should be granted the opportunity to honor and pray for those who have fallen in service to our nation.
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