JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A federal judge has shut down a Jacksonville pastor’s free-speech lawsuit about his microphone being turned off over controversial remarks during his invocation at a City Council meeting.
“[T]he court reiterates that it is not meant to be the arbiter of what is allowable ‘prayer’ and what is not,” U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis wrote in an order that ended the Rev. R.L. Gundy’s court case.
Gundy, senior pastor at Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, talked in his prayer shortly before the March 2019 city elections about people being “intimidated, threatened and bullied by an executive branch of our city government while cronyism and nepotism is being exercised in backrooms.”
His comments prompted Aaron Bowman, the council president at that time, to try to rein in the pastor, then silence the microphone when Gundy kept talking.
Gundy argued that Bowman’s action violated his rights under both the state and U.S. Constitution's First Amendment out of loyalty to Mayor Lenny Curry’s administration. He had been invited to speak that day by Anna Brosche, who was a council member running for mayor against Curry.
City lawyers asked for a summary judgment in their favor, essentially a ruling that there was no legal issue to be decided.
The judge found that an invocation was a “nonpublic forum,” a ceremony that was designed to be uplifting and unifying. He said the council can set rules for those as long as they’re reasonable and “viewpoint neutral.”
He said Gundy’s remarks were “at times objectively disparaging of the City Council and the incumbent administration” and that Bowman shutting him down would have been within council rules.
“[W]hile the remarks might have been entirely appropriate if delivered in a more public forum or even [the] plaintiff’s pulpit, they were subject to the reasonable and viewpoint-neutral limitations set by the city for the invocation,” the judge wrote.
In his 18-page order, he added later that “the city prevailed in this action because the record does not reflect that the city had a history of arbitrary enforcement” of its rules. “On a different record … a different outcome could result.”
Gundy had also sued Bowman but the judge removed him from the lawsuit in November.
