15
October 2014 A.D. Houston
Pastors: Over-reaction & Routine
Discovery in Litigation
Is
Houston demanding oversight of pastors’ sermons? No.
Several people have contacted me over the
recent Fox News headline, “City of Houston
demands pastors turn over sermons.” WND.com was even broader: “Houston
demands oversight of sermons.” There is no doubt that the Mayor and
City Council are radical and aggressive LGBT activists trying to advance their
agenda against all morality and
the will of the people in the actual subject matter behind these headlines. But
the actual case does not warrant these alarming headlines, and our activists ought to be more
responsible.
I write this only to calm some of the
unnecessary alarm, and to introduce some reason and understanding into the mix.
The headlines read as if the city has made some move to start monitoring all
pastors’ sermons, and this simply is not the case. It also gives the impression
that this is some out-of-the-blue, general attack tactic by the activists upon
the pulpit. It is not. It is not out-of-the-blue, it is not broad and general
as far as the implicated pastors goes, and it should not be a surprise at all.
The City is not making a move to monitor
sermons. The city is merely responding to a lawsuit against it and using
standard powers of discovery in regard to a handful of pastors who are
implicated as relevant to the lawsuit. The issue is here: once you file a
lawsuit, you open up yourself and potentially
your friends and acquaintances to discovery. This is the aspect
that has not been reported, but it is an important part of the context.
This is basic court procedure. But the headlines
make it sound like a surprise attack by leftists advancing their agenda on
unsuspecting Christians.
Even the Alliance Defending Freedom’s
(they are representing the plaintiffs who filed suit) write up gives the
impression that this is an attack on irrelevant bystanders, saying “the
pastors are not even involved.” That’s not necessarily true. The pastors are
not a party in the
lawsuit, true, but at least some of them are quite possibly “involved,” and
that’s a significant point. To the extent they are involved, Texas court rules
(like most court rules) give allowance for discovery of evidence in their
associations with the parties to the suit and the subject matter of it.
What is “discovery of evidence”? Is this
some liberal tactic that has perverted our legal system? No, it is civil legal
procedure 101. Granted, I am not a lawyer, but that’s the point: this is basic stuff.
Once a case enters litigation, both
sides have fairly broad—although protected and defined—allowances
to demand papers, communications, etc., related to or potentially related to
the subject matter of the case. Why? Because any relevant or related material
may produce evidence crucial to the case. It’s a basic legal right that is
important to justice in the big picture.
Further, it is not unprecedented at all for people who are not party to the case to be
ordered by the court either to testify or produce materials during the
discovery phase. That is what a subpoena is. It happens all the time, because
even if you’re not actually a party in the suit, you may in fact have
interacted with them in such a way and on relevant topics that your interactions
are crucial, or at least relevant, to the case.
Let’s consider an example to which
Christians can relate. Suppose an openly Christian mayor attended, during
office hours, a Day of Prayer event outside the Mayor’s Office Building on a
given date. I have no problem with that, of course, but suppose a local atheist
group objected and filed a lawsuit. Let’s suppose further that behind the
scenes, a Marxist nonprofit group, members of which are friends and colleagues
with the atheist group, was possibly helping fund and coordinate the lawsuit
for the purposes of destroying the mayor’s reputation and taking over the local
city council. Yet the Marxist group is not a party to the suit. Would the
mayor, now a defendant under fire, be legally interested in the communications
taking place between those groups? Could those correspondences and even group
speeches be relevant to the case? Could they exonerate the mayor? Maybe, maybe
not. What if, possibly, those communications contain the only evidence that could exonerate
the accused? Is it reasonable that those communications could at least lead to
the discovery of relevant evidence important to the mayor’s defense? Depending
on the nature of the claims filed, absolutely.
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