I was called for jury duty years ago, for a routine slip-and-fall case — an elderly woman slipped on a wet grocery store floor. I was asked whether there was any reason I should not serve on the jury. Well, yes, I said. I think slip-and-fall cases should be settled, out-of-court. Everyone laughed — even the judge smiled. But that didn’t get me off the case.
The trial began; the old woman toddled on up to the witness stand and began to tell the sordid story of the wet floor. After a few moments, the defense lawyer asked for a brief adjournment. Finally. The trial never resumed. A settlement was reached.
That’s how many, if not most, legal squabbles get resolved, especially on the lower end of the civil-case pecking order, but even on the criminal side. Unless the evidence is truly murky, or the stakes are extraordinary high, or a grand constitutional issue is at stake, or the case has unusual entertainment value — or the issue is whether newspaper columnists should get overtime if it takes them longer than 40 hours to write a column, which is often the case — then the grand compromise/negotiation/settlement machine kicks in — and the cases go away.
Even the grandiose Clinton pizza parlor scandal, in which the state labor bureaucracy was poised to sentence a guy to death for letting his young kids (“child labor”) help out at the restaurant, was eventually settled — even though I had predicted it would go all the way to the Supreme Court, just because it was fun and the pizza guy was really cranky.
And now, of course, there is the Enfield public schools/First Cathedral case, a rather modest, sort-of-church/state kind of case that just seems to go on and on and on.
The issue is whether the Enfield school board teetered on the edge of a separation-of-church-and-state, First Amendment sin when it sort of, kind of, decided to hold a school graduation ceremony at First Cathedral in Bloomfield — one of those thriving, evangelical kind of joints that is big enough to hold a large graduation crowd, without long lines outside the bathrooms.
The American Civil Liberties Union (which scared four other school districts out of their church venues) and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State have squared off against the American Center for Law and Justice, to litter the federal courts with temporary injunctions and requests for a permanent injunction (that decision is pending) and appellate filings — while the poor Enfield school board moved the graduations elsewhere, and then shrugged and mumbled and flip-flopped and eventually sort of voted 5-4 to proceed with an appeal of the original ruling that prohibited it from holding the graduation ceremonies at a church.
There’s nothing unusual about lobbing an interesting church-state case up the appellate court ladder; legal briefs are better than Holy Wars. But this particular case?
The initial ruling last May by U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall seemed overwrought, when she suggested that the choice of the church venue “favors the religious over the irreligious and that it prefers Christians over those who subscribe to other faiths, or no faith at all.”
You Christians often deserve to be slapped around a bit by the courts for some sneaky intrusions into the Public Square, but the Enfield case doesn’t merit much more than a yawn.
Agree to have the graduations at banquet halls, in perpetuity — or go to the church and cover up Jesus with some nondenominational sheets, until the ceremony is over.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
