Say Anything Blog

Tonight during our podcast Steve Cates and I got on the topic of the 10 commandments monument controversy down in Fargo.  Steve told me an interesting thing about the case.  Apparently several years ago, when the Red River Freethinkers first started their crusade against the 10 commandments monument, they applied to the University of North Dakota law school for federal legal aid money in order to pursue a lawsuit against the city of Fargo.  An amount of about $30,000 or so.

Which is odd for a group of people who oppose spending “their” tax dollars on a religious monument.  They care deeply about how their tax dollars are spent, but I guess they don’t really mind spending my tax dollars on their ridiculous waste-of-time lawsuit.

Typical liberals wanting everyone else to pay for their activism.

You want to know another funny thing about the Freethinkers?  They’re a group of atheists...who meet in the basement of a church. A Unitarian church, granted, but still.

Update: Steve Cates sends along this article from the third issue of the Dakota Beacon:

A Ten Commandments monument was donated to the city of Fargo by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1958 in honor of the city renewal project. In storage for a time it was placed in its current location in 1961. Amazingly, no one is known to have been offended until 2001 when the demand was made that the monument be removed on the basis that the irreligious were offended by the existence of the Commandments on public property.

With a Communist beginning and deep socialist roots the ACLU will pontificate all day about their mission to protect the constitution but the totality of their work indicates highly preferential protection. This group has objectives that include as stated directives of urging the repeal of all laws against all pornography, supports removing “under God” from the pledge of allegiance, supports the legal status of homosexual marriages, and is against making English the official U.S. language.

All across America the ACLU finds local groups as a front for their national agenda and first tries to intimidate local communities with the threat of litigation and the “waste of taxpayer dollars” should the defense of the monument be unsuccessful. The Red River Free Thinkers (who meet in the basement of the Fargo-Moorhead Unitarian Universalist Church), with members holding atheist or agnostic views, were the “local front group” for the ACLU driven demand that the Commandments be removed from public property.

The North Dakota Family Alliance, a state-wide, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of traditional family values, organized a rally and circulated petitions for local residents to show their support. The Fargo Human Relations Commission chaired by Cheryl Bergian (past-president of the Fargo-Moorhead Unitarian Universalist Church) did not disclose her relationship with the Freethinkers, voted to remove the Commandments after testimony that overwhelmingly support not moving the Commandments.

The Fargo City Commission was not cowed by the vote of the Commission or threats of litigation by the ACLU. With the overwhelming backing of the community said NO. Not satisfied with this result Freethinkers Davis Cope, Lewis Lubka, William Treumann and Wesley Twombly, and former Fargo mayor John Lungren decided to mount a lawsuit against the city in 2002 demanding that the monument be removed.

The Freethinkers and the former mayor felt so passionate about their suite that they spent none of their own money to promulgate it. The citizens of North Dakota paid plaintiff’s costs through the University of North Dakota Law School’s Civil Rights Project of the UND Clinical Education Program. Exactly how much this really cost the state’s taxpayers will be impossible to ever learn. One thing is for sure, the citizens of Fargo paid both ways (thirty thousand dollars in defense of the monument).