- Click here for the article.
A furor involving a small-town Texas police department and national secular organization has reached the state attorney general's office, and may well wind up in court after that.
At issue: does slapping "In God We Trust" stickers on police patrol cars violate the U.S. constitution?
After fielding a complaint from a citizen of Childress, a Panhandle town of about 6,000, the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent the town’s police department a letter last month asking it to stop using the motto.
The Wisconsin-based foundation, a national church-state watchdog group that claims to be the country's largest association of atheists and agnostics, argued placing the slogan on an official police vehicle breaches the wall separating church and state.
In a widely shared response, Childress Police Chief Adrian Garcia wrote: “After carefully reading your letter, I must deny your request in the removal of our nation’s motto from our patrol units and ask that you and the Freedom From Religion Foundation go fly a kite.”
That response, which Garcia posted on his department’s Facebook page had been liked more than 170,000 times, shared by more than 145,000 accounts and drawn about 20,000 comments as of Monday.
Monday, the two state legislators representing Childress — state Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, and state Rep. Drew Springer, R-Muenster — asked Attorney General Ken Paxtonto weigh in on the question.
Adopted in the mid 1950s as the nation’s motto, “In God We Trust” is an exclusionary, “Johnny-come-lately” that is unconstitutional and “turns believers into insiders and non-believers into outsiders,” Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of Freedom From Religion Foundation, told The Texas Tribune.
Related: Ken Paxton asked to support ‘In God We Trust’ on police cars.
