Illi­nois State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Monique Davis said some nasty things to athe­ist activist and Green Party can­di­date for State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the 53rd Dis­trict of Illi­nois Rob Sher­man dur­ing an Illi­nois State Gov­ern­ment Admin­is­tra­tion Com­mit­tee hear­ing, to which the lat­ter had been called to tes­tify on the pro­pri­ety of the Governor’s pro­posed plan to give $1M of the tax­pay­ers’ money to the Pil­grim Bap­tist Church for restora­tion and preservation.

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Par­tial tran­script, bor­rowed from Eugene Volokh:

. . .

Davis: . . . What you have to spew and spread is extremely dan­ger­ous, it’s dangerous–

Sher­man: What’s dan­ger­ous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dan­ger­ous to the pro­gres­sion of this state. And it’s dan­ger­ous for our chil­dren to even know that your phi­los­o­phy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the oppor­tu­nity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sher­man: Thank you for shar­ing your per­spec­tive with me, and I’m sure that if this mat­ter does go to court—

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in some­thing. You believe in destroy­ing! You believe in destroy­ing what this state was built upon.

. . .

I for one have no prob­lem with one per­son telling another that such and so a phi­los­o­phy is dan­ger­ous. I do it all the time. But Davis is a gov­ern­ment offi­cial, pre­sid­ing over a gov­ern­ment hear­ing, telling a wit­ness that he may no longer tes­tify because she has deemed, with­out due process, that noth­ing he might have to say should be permitted.

Sher­man is a Green Party can­di­date, so I’m sure there are parts of his phi­los­o­phy (includ­ing fun­da­men­tal meta­phys­i­cal and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal premises) which can rightly be con­sid­ered “dan­ger­ous.” His cam­paign plat­form is a blend of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and envi­ron­men­tal fas­cism typ­i­cal of his party. Athe­ism is very surely a “dan­ger­ous” phi­los­o­phy if one is a Chris­t­ian, and I’m sure Davis feels very threat­ened by it. But nei­ther her sub­jec­tive opin­ion, nor the incor­rect­ness of that opin­ion, is the real cause for dis­tress here.

The prob­lem here is that a gov­ern­ment offi­cial, in her offi­cial capac­ity, tried to eject a wit­ness from an offi­cial leg­isla­tive hear­ing with­out due process or prob­a­ble cause. As you can hear from the clip, Sher­man did not leave the stand and con­tin­ued his tes­ti­mony. Nonethe­less, Davis is a prime exam­ple of what hap­pens when reli­gious politi­cians fail to respect the rule of law.

Update: Not so much an update as an adden­dum. At com­mon law, athe­ists were dis­qual­i­fied from tes­ti­fy­ing in court because the oath (to God, on the Bible) to tell the truth would have no mean­ing for them and would there­fore fail to put them in mean­ing­ful fear of the con­se­quences of untruth­ful­ness on the stand. Such dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion is no longer con­sti­tu­tional, and the Fed­eral Rules of Evi­dence, enacted by Con­gress and used in all Fed­eral courts and many State courts by adop­tion, expressly dis­al­low dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion of wit­nesses on reli­gious grounds. Nonethe­less, many State con­sti­tu­tions still con­tain inop­er­a­tive clauses dis­qual­i­fy­ing athe­ists from giv­ing evi­dence in court. Of course, none of this is rel­e­vant, as this inci­dent occurred in a leg­isla­tive hear­ing, which is not the same as a trial in court, but I thought some­one might find it interesting.