Long court battle ends in evangelist’s favor
n 2004, evangelist Hattie Hopkins asked permission to use a library meeting room for a religious service. But Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Jordan Lorence says Hopkins was told religious services were barred.
“This is a meeting room in a library that is basically open to about anything you can imagine, from meetings of political parties — the Democrats had meetings there — to tryouts for ‘American Idol’ to you name it, and that the only thing that was singled out were certain types of religious meetings,” he notes. Last week, following a years-long court battle, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that after July 5, the library can no longer prohibit such meetings.