Wyoming Supreme Court dismisses atheist's $24M lawsuit over religious invocations
Bruce Williams said the city of Gillette suppressed his atheist beliefs
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After suing the city of Gillette, Wyoming for $24,250,000, claiming officials there suppressed his religious beliefs by letting Christians deliver just about all the invocations at city council meetings, an atheist has finally had his case dismissed at the highest level.
Late last week, the Wyoming Supreme Court rejected an appeal brought forth by Bruce B. Williams. Their five-page written opinion reiterated what a district court judge said last year when he dismissed the case: The city and mayor had “sovereign immunity” from being sued. The state legislature can provide exemptions to that, but Williams didn’t go that route, and therefore he can’t sue on these grounds.
The justices wrote:
Mr. Williams asserts direct constitutional claims against the Mayor and city officials. Because the [Wyoming Governmental Claims Act] does not permit these claims against elected officials, the district court did not err in dismissing Mr. Williams’s complaint for failing to state a viable cause of action.
In essence, government officials in the state cannot be sued unless the state’s legislature specifically permits it. In 1979, they passed the Wyoming Governmental Claims Act (WGCA), which gives them say into when lawsuits can be filed against government officials who are performing their “official duties.”
Williams, however, said the city council members were acting outside their official duties. That’s why he didn’t seek the legislature’s permission to move forward.
The justices said that wasn’t the case. The city council members were indeed on duty when the invocations were delivered. Because of that, any lawsuit against them (for this reason) would need to go through the legislature first because of the WGCA. The ultimate “decision of whether to waive immunity for a governmental entity,” the justices wrote, “belongs to the Wyoming Legislature, not this Court.”
Which is a long way of saying Williams’ lawsuit may be dismissed but the case may not be over.
So what is this all about, anyway?
Williams said in his original lawsuit that the city council holds about 24 meetings per year, and since roughly a quarter of Wyoming citizens are unaffiliated with religion, there ought to be a proportional number of secular invocations. He wanted to deliver at least two, he said, but possibly five or six if no other non-theists stepped up. In 2017 and 2018, he gave two invocations. Since then, he had been limited to one a year.
Williams said the city rejected his requests to deliver additional invocations while giving a select group of Christians just about all the opportunities to deliver the rest of them.
"The City refused my request for multiple invocations," said Williams in his lawsuit, adding that city leaders wouldn't tell him what group was "controlling those that were giving the invocations."
Ultimately, Williams said in the suit, he learned that an unincorporated Christian group conducted many invocations. He said the city has been "creating a mockery of my Atheist beliefs through (its) deliberate preference for Christianity," and by either prohibiting or limiting his "worship" as an atheist.
As I mentioned last year when he filed his lawsuit, while Wyoming is about 26% unaffiliated, atheists are about 3% of the population. Using that estimate, atheists should be giving one invocation a year. Which is exactly what was happening.
But none of that even mattered because that’s not how any of this works! It’s not like the city is obligated to have a Mormon speaker, a Muslim speaker, and a Satanist speaker in the mix. There are far more religions represented in Wyoming (yes, really) than the number of meetings held by the city council. And that assumes non-Christian speakers are requesting to give those invocations. If they did, the city couldn’t refuse them (assuming they were trying to accommodate everyone to the best of their abilities), but there existed no rule saying a city council has to dole out invocation opportunities based on the latest statewide religious demographics.
Williams argued that he was simply taking a page from the Wyoming Constitution, which says, “The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall be forever guaranteed in this state.” By his reading of the statute, limiting him (as an atheist) to one invocation a year was an act of discrimination.
I didn’t personally buy the argument because I didn’t see any strong evidence of discrimination by the city council members. It’s not like they had one Christian chaplain giving every prayer or rotated only between a select group of local church representatives.
That said, their system wasn’t perfect. Williams had to request invocation opportunities while Christian pastors never had to jump through those same hoops. They were playing by different rules. It appeared that the city of Gillette had a mix of a pastors’ group handling invocations (which was bad!) while allowing others to speak every now and then (which was the least they could do).
The city’s system needed to be fixed, but it didn’t seem like a clear-cut case of discrimination.
Williams also said in the lawsuit that city council members often walked out of the room while he was speaking, sending the message that his beliefs were “nothing but horse manure.”
Was that really a problem, though? They have the right to leave. There’s no law that says they have to listen to him speak. It’s arguably rude, and I’m sure people would flip out if a council member walked out on a Christian pastor’s invocation, but a rude overreaction wasn’t illegal.
Williams told me he disagreed with my assessment and pointed to a state law that said, “Perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and no inhabitant of this state shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship.” His argument was that, by storming out during his invocation, those council members had “molested” his “worship” (to use the phrasing in the Wyoming Constitution).
I would still argue that their actions didn’t actually interfere with his ability to deliver a secular invocation. Had those council members just remained outside during the whole process, that would’ve been fine, Williams argued, but they used his invocation to make a statement, and that’s what upset him.
Williams also said in the lawsuit that on a couple of occasions, when he was delivering an invocation, he was also asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s unclear if that was some honest mistake, but the lawsuit made it sound like the government forced him to participate in a religious ritual without giving him a chance to opt out.
After all that, why was Williams suing for $24,250,000? Where did that number come from?
He said the “conspiratorial oppression” has occurred 97 distinct times over several years, and each instance carried with it a $250,000 fine. (That amount is the maximum penalty in the state for a violation of civil law.) Williams believed their needed to be a significant financial penalty to stop officials from continuing these religious rituals in the future.
“I’d like to get the $24 million,” he told me last year. “Half of that would be my goal just so that they know the next time they pull a stunt like this… it’ll hurt ‘em again.” He added that this has been going on for nine years, and the council members needed to learn that “doing things like this is going to be costly.”
Unfortunately for him, no judge agreed with that assessment. Or at least not the way he was arguing it.
Clair McFarland, writing for Cowboy State Daily, explains that the decision doesn’t mean this case is over… only that Williams will have to try again using a different approach, and even then, there’s no telling if it will work:
The proper law on which to base civil rights claims, or constitutional wrongs, is a 150-year-old federal law, rather: 42 USC 1983.
“Mr. Williams recognized 1983 as a vehicle for relief in his appellate briefing, but he did not seek relief through that statute in his complaint,” the order says.
The high court’s order doesn’t contemplate whether Williams has a chance of winning a lawsuit by filing a 1983 case in federal court. It merely shuts down his state lawsuit for being based on the wrong law.
Last night, after reading through the decision, Williams told me he would probably refile his lawsuit “in about 3 or 4 months” but with a different approach: He’ll go through the federal court system instead—and ask for a larger penalty per violation, meaning he’ll be suing for much more than $24 million.
Still, he was frustrated by the state’s dismissal, adding that “if you have a constitutional right” but no way to enforce it, “you literally have nothing but a piece of toilet paper.” He’s not wrong about that. In a red state where the legislature is almost certainly not going to help out an atheist suing a local government, winning this case now seems like even more of a long shot.
That doesn’t mean this case was an exercise in futility, though. If the purpose of invocations is to bring the community together, it’s clearly failing. By not having a more transparent system for people to sign up to speak, the city is creating its own chaos. They could fix the problem by establishing easy-to-understand policies that don’t involve outsourcing speakers to local Christian leaders. They could also get rid of invocations altogether. If nothing else, a lawsuit like this serves to highlight the problem of trying to shove religion into meetings where it doesn’t belong.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
I have some sympathy for his case, but the real problem here lies with governmental meetings opening with ANY kind of invocation. The founders did not give religion any role to play in government, and that was not an accidental omission. It's high time for conservative Christians to be banned from marking their territory in the public square.
"Sovereign immunity?" Didn't know we were a monarchy.