[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday will hear a new religious rights case [petitioner brief, pdf] about whether an Arizona town violated a church’s rights by requiring it to remove signs regarding its worship services. In the appeal by the Good News Community Church [official website] of Gilber, AZ, the church argues that by forcing them to remove the signage the town violated its First Amendment constitutional [text] rights. The church’s pastor Clyde Reed [official profile] says that the town’s ordinance requiring removal of the sign was particularly harsh on religious signs, as well as on other signs displaying political and ideological messages. The church is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom [official website], a group of conservative Christian attorneys. The case appears to weigh in favor of the church, who has received a great deal of support as opposed to the town, which has received very little.

Religious rights have always been an important political topic in the US, particularly recently with contraceptive use [JURIST backgrounder]. In June the Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] 5-4 that closely held for-profit corporations can deny coverage of contraception costs because of their religious beliefs. Earlier in June a judge for the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma granted an injunction [JURIST rep;ort] that temporarily exempts more than 200 Catholic employers from providing insurance coverage for birth control under the of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In May the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled [JURIST report] that the Pledge of Allegiance’s words “under God” do not discriminate against non-religious people since the language is patriotic and not religious. In April the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld [JURIST report] a regulation by the New York City Board of Education banning religious groups from holding worship services in school buildings.