Atheists Urge Appeals Court Not to Allow Christian Flag at Boston’s City Hall
By Hemant Mehta, July 20, 2020

In an ongoing saga involving a Christian flag outside Boston’s City Hall Plaza, a coalition of pro-church/state separation groups have filed an amicus brief as the case heads to an appellate court.

Some background: Harold Shurtleff is the director and co-founder of Camp Constitution, a non-profit group that promotes the idea that we live in a “Christian nation.” (He’s wrong.) In 2017, Shurtleff applied for a permit to raise a Christian flag on a pole outside City Hall Plaza to commemorate “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day”… but the city of Boston rejected the request.

Shurtleff contended this was religious discrimination. Even if atheists flags weren’t allowed either, there were plenty of other flags with religious symbols allowed to go up, including the national flag for Portugal — which includes a religious symbol — during the city’s Portuguese-American festival. The city even acknowledged that significance on its website at the time. Plus, the city flag for Boston includes a Latin phrase that translates to “God be with us as he was with our fathers.”

Religion itself wasn’t the problem, he argued, so why weren’t they letting him hoist a Christian flag when he went through all the proper motions?

Officials told him non-secular flags were prohibited from using the city’s flagpole. They also implied that an explicitly Christian flag was different from a national or local flag with a religious symbol on it. Shurtleff wasn’t buying it, so he filed a lawsuit in 2018 claiming this was a violation of his constitutional rights.

He didn’t get very far with that one. That year, U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper denied him a preliminary injunction. And earlier this year, she officially rejected his challenge. In short, she said that Boston had every right to reject his Christian flag.