An attorney representing a Maine church that’s suing a university system for allegedly refusing to sell a property to them because the religious entity objects to same-sex marriage has warned of “broader implications” if the congregation loses the case.
Last year, Calvary Chapel Belfast filed a lawsuit against the University of Maine System when the academic institution rescinded an offer to buy a school property, allegedly because of local outrage over the church’s religious views.
Liberty Counsel Associate Vice President of Legal Affairs, Daniel Schmid, who is helping to represent Calvary Chapel in court, told The Christian Post that there were “broader implications” if the church’s lawsuit is rejected.
“The broader implications are that religious entities aren’t welcome in the public square,” said Schmid, noting that the church had won “an otherwise neutral and fair bidding process.”
Schmid also raised concerns about the idea that a community “can then incite a mob, go after the officials who are behind that decision” and “say they need to rescind that because ‘we don’t want the church in our backyard.”
If that becomes acceptable, according to Schmid, “then what church has any hope of succeeding in a hostile environment?”
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from discriminating on the basis of religion,” he added. “To allow a government to rescind an otherwise fair bidding process because the entity that won is a church would run roughshod over it.”
“When Calvary Chapel Belfast called us and told us what had occurred during the procurement process there in Maine, it was clear to us that there was religious discrimination taking place, and so we agreed to represent them to make sure that did not continue.”
In August of last year, Calvary Chapel filed a successful bid to purchase the Belfast, Maine-based Hutchinson Center at the University of Maine. However, following extensive local backlash to the church, the university rescinded the agreement and instead, later accepted an offer from Waldo Community Action Partners.
Calvary Chapel filed the complaint last November, the litigation claiming that university officials wrongfully rescinded their offer due to local religious animosity toward the church.
In May, U.S. District Judge Stacey D. Neumann, a Biden appointee, rejected Calvary Chapel’s motion for a preliminary injunction, concluding that the church had “produced no evidence of impermissible religious animus from within UMS.
Neumann also wrote that “the alleged substantive and procedural departures are not probative of any intent by the System to discriminate on the basis of religion or adopt the community’s religious animus.”
“The record demonstrates [System Vice Chancellor of Finance Ryan Low] made the decision to rescind the award and issue a new RFP based on one of the same factors the second-appeal-level administrator would usually consider: cost savings,” wrote Neumann.
The church has since submitted an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to get an injunction in their favor, with a reply brief being filed last week.
For his part, Schmid took issue with the claims that religious animus was not present in the district court decision, telling CP that the UMS vice chancellor for finance “admitted that the cost savings rationale was already basically included in the original procurement process.”
“We had testimony from numerous government officials showing that it was the level of religious hostility put to the university by donors, alumni, faculty, employees, and even legislators all saying, ‘if you sell this building to the church, we have to seriously rethink our support for the university system,’” he said.
“They were under immense pressure. The procurement officer who was in charge of all these things said she had never seen this much animosity or response to any procurement process. So, there was ample evidence that there was hostility towards the church’s religious views.”
Schmid also rejected the idea that the absence of overt religious hostility in the record meant that there was no religious discrimination, adding that, typically, “people aren’t in general stupid enough to say, ‘oh yeah, we’re doing this because we don’t like religion.’”
“So, what do they do otherwise? They create a pretext. And that’s what Vice Chancellor Low’s decision was, it was pretextual,” he claimed, believing that officials were masking their “religious discrimination by calling it a cost savings approach.”
