Jehovah's Witnesses & Religious Liberty
Pledging to the Flag (aftermath)
Although many Court opinions have provoked strong reactions, none have provoked such a wave of violence across the entire country. It is this which should, without question, demonstrate not only why the government should not get involved in either supporting or hindering religion, but why the government should not disparage any minority. By doing so, official sanction was given for people to vent anti-Witness feelings.
Hundreds of attacks were reported to the Justice Department in the two following years. Among the worst were the burning of a Kingdom Hall in Maine, police assisting a mob in Maryland in dispersing a Bible meeting, and nearly an entire town in Illinois attacking a group of Witnesses, which required calling in state police to protect them.
In West Virginia, a chief of police and deputy sheriff forced a group of Jehovah's Witnesses to drink large quantities of castor oil, tied them up with police department rope, and paraded them through town. In Nebraska, a Witness was kidnapped, beaten, and castrated. All of these acts - and many more like them - were traced directly back to the Gobitis ruling.
Justice Harlan Stone wrote a strongly-worded dissent to that ruling which became a primary basis of the reversal of this decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette three years later. This time, Justice Jackson wrote the majority opinion, finding that the school district violated the rights of students by forcing them to salute the American flag.
Unlike the Court Decision in Gobitis, this Court did not declare that allowing an individual's rights to be supported over government authority is a sign of a weak government, and compulsion was not found to be legitimate means for creating national unity.
Jackson was also very clear that efforts to foster national unity through compulsion put minorities and dissenters at the mercy of "village tyrants" and "evil men," reflecting directly on the nation's recent experiences: "Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion only achieves the unanimity of the graveyard." Although those words were particularly relevant in 1943, they have lost none of their force.
This case is especially important because it underscores exactly what the Bill of Rights means. Justice Frankfurter had refused to protect First Amendment liberties against the actions of local government and electoral majorities. Justice Jackson, however, pointed out that that is exactly what the Bill of Rights exists for:
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the reach of majorities and officials. One's right to worship, life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend upon the outcome of no election.
We can thank religious minorities, and Jehovah's Witnesses in particular, for forcing the American court system to really deal with the concept of religious liberty. Because of them, our legal system was compelled to acknowledge that religious liberty existed for all people, not simply those who are part of sectarian majorities.
Jehovah's Witnesses and Religious Liberty
