First Liberty has announced its filed for certiorari with SCOTUS for the case of …
… LCpl Monifa Sterling, a Marine convicted at a court martial in 2013 for refusing an order to remove Bible verses from her personal workspace.
The IB Times reported during previous, military court appeals:
Sterling was charged after she refused to take down a single Bible verse she used to decorate her cubicle in three locations. She later told the court she had posted them in a triangular shape to represent the Holy Trinity. …
“This is a case of insubordination,” Brian Keller, the attorney representing the federal government, told a five-judge panel Wednesday during the hearing. The judges are expected to weigh the arguments and release their decision later this year.
So it’s not entirely clear to me if the issue is the display of religious verses, or failure to obey an order. First Liberty, a conservative group devoted to religious freedom, suggests the issue is the former:
First Liberty attorneys argue that Sterling’s right to post Bible verses is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, a federal law that should apply to all American citizens.
But so far, every court to hear Sterling’s case has claimed that RFRA doesn’t protect Sterling’s right to display a Bible verse.
Chris Rodda on HuffPo points out that Sterling had also been court-martialed for other charges unconnected with the Bible incident, such as refusing the orders of a superior officer and lying about a medical treatment, and suggests this is all trumped up:
Of all the charges that Sterling was found guilty of at her court-martial, the charge of disobeying the order to remove the signs was not the most serious of the charges brought against her. In fact, as the transcript of the court-martial shows, the Bible verse incident received the least amount of attention at the court-martial. But now, thanks to the propaganda from fundamentalist Christian organizations and the right wing media, Sterling’s case has been turned into a case of outrageous Christian persecution. Anyone reading articles about this case on the internet would think that Sterling is a poor, persecuted Christian who was court-martialed for nothing more than posting a Bible verse on her desk.
An article from the Washington Times, for example, titled “High military court will hear case of Marine punished for displaying Bible verse,” begins: “The highest U.S. military court will hear the case of a Marine who was punished for refusing to remove a Bible verse from her workstation.”
For the curious, if four Justices agree to hear the case, then SCOTUS accepts it (‘grants certiorari”). It’ll be interesting to see if the Court decides to hear the case.
