In an amazing, unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on May 2 that the City of Boston violated the free speech rights of a Christian group by refusing to fly a flag bearing the image of a cross at City Hall, even though it had allowed hundreds of other groups to fly various flags, including the flags of Communist China, Communist Cuba, and the rainbow flags of LGBTQ groups, as part of a program that let private organizations use the flagpole while holding events in the plaza below. In 2017, Harold “Hal Shurtleff, the founder-director of Camp Constitution, a Christian camp and retreat center, filed suit after being denied the opportunity to fly the Christian flag. It was blatant discrimination against Christians. The SCOTUS decision, written by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, came out the day before the infamous leak of the SCOTUS draft of the Dobbs/Roe decision and thus, was completely eclipsed by the furor that followed. Thanks to the heroic persistence of Hal Shurtleff – and Liberty Council, which represented him – the SCOTUS ruling in Shurtleff v. Boston will help curtail the anti-Christian bias that has infected many of our government policies and court rulings for much of the past century.
Senior editor William F. Jasper is an author/journalist/commentator/documentary producer with a well-earned reputation as one of America’s top investigative reporters, most renowned for his in-depth, years-long investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. For more than three decades he served as an accredited correspondent at the United Nations in New York and UN summits around the world.
