WallBuilders Sues After ‘Christian’ Bus Ad Rejected, ACLU Joins Forces
A Christian group focused on highlighting America’s Judeo-Christian history is suing the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) over the claim its bus ads were rejected for religious reasons, a lawsuit that has attracted support from an unlikely ally: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Tim Barton, president of WallBuilders, told CBN Digital his organization clashed with WMATA when the transit authority reportedly rejected his ads focused on the “truth of America’s history.”
“There’s not many places you can get more American history than Washington, D. C., when you have the Smithsonian, you have the Library of Congress, you have the National Archives, of course the Capitol Building,” Barton said. He continued, “There’s so much history there, and we thought, ‘We would love to be able to advertise in a place where people, school groups … Americans from all over the United States are going to learn, and experience … some of American history.”
With WallBuilders premiering a new website, he and his team thought it was the perfect time to take out some bus ads, but were stunned when the ads were rejected. “We worked with an agency in D.C.,” Barton said. “We chose two pretty iconic images. We chose George Washington kneeling in the snow praying … [and], also, we picked the painting of the Founding Fathers of the Constitutional Convention, where, again, George Washington, very prominent, he’s the president of that convention.”
WallBuilders then superimposed the word “Christian” with a question mark at the end of it, including a QR code that would link people to the WallBuilders website to learn more. The goal, he said, was to address whether the Founding Fathers were Christians, noting the link would take people to a page allowing the Founding Fathers to “speak for themselves.” But Barton said this didn’t go over well.
“We got word back to the ad agency that … WMATA … came back and said that the ad was not acceptable, that it didn’t kind of pass their code and their standard,” he said.
At that point, WallBuilders reached out to First Liberty, a free speech and First Amendment legal watchdog, to get advice, noting the WMATA purportedly had policies against anything controversial, political, or religious. Watch Barton and First Liberty attorney Jeremy Dys explain the case and resulting lawsuit.
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