Axing Former Fire Chief for Expressing His Faith Costs Atlanta $1.2M – By Mark Tapscott (lifezette.com) / Oct 17 2018
City to pay after court rules unconstitutional an order barring Kelvin Cochran from writing marriage book for Christian men
Atlanta City officials will pay former fire chief Kelvin Cochran $1.2 million as a result of a federal court ruling that they violated his First Amendment rights to express his faith by writing a book on marriage for Christian men.
“All Americans are guaranteed the freedom of actually believing and thinking in such a way that it does not cost them the consequences that I’ve experienced in this termination,” Cochran said in a statement.
Cochran (pictured above right) was fired after he wrote — on his own time — a 162-page devotional book that included statements about his personal views on marriage and sex without submitting it to the city for approval prior to publication.
Atlanta Mayor Mohammed Kasim Reed (pictured above left) ordered Cochran suspended without pay for a month and ordered him to undergo sensitivity training. Then, in May 2015, Reed fired Cochran.
Cochran had been a firefighter for 30 years. He’d only recently returned to serve as Atlanta’s fire chief in 2010 following a year as a federal fire administrator under President Barack Obama.
Neither the city’s policy nor its defense of it were accepted by Judge Leigh Martin May of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
“This policy would prevent an employee from writing and selling a book on golf or badminton on his own time and, without prior approval, would subject him to firing. It is unclear to the court how such an outside employment would ever affect the city’s ability to function, and the city provides no evidence to justify it … The potential for stifled speech far outweighs any unsupported assertion of harm,” May wrote in a Dec. 20, 2017, decision.
The judge added that provisions within the city’s rules “do not set out objective standards for the supervisor to employ … This does not pass constitutional muster.”
“The government can’t force its employees to get its permission before engaging in free speech. In addition, as the court found, the city can’t leave such decisions to the whims of government officials.”
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) senior counsel Kevin Theriot argued the case in the federal court.
“The government can’t force its employees to get its permission before engaging in free speech. In addition, as the court found, the city can’t leave such decisions to the whims of government officials,” Theriot said.
“This ruling benefits not only Chief Cochran, but also other employees who want to write books or speak about matters unrelated to work. Atlanta can no longer force them to get permission or deny them permission just because certain officials disagree with the views expressed,” he said.
The ADF has won nine Supreme Court cases on behalf of free exercise of religious freedom of expression and assembly, most recently in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
In that decision, the high court said state officials cannot force cake shop owner Jack Phillips to create unique wedding decorations that express a message that violates his religious beliefs.
