Kansas inmate says prison force-fed Christianity to prisoners, lawsuit claims

WashPost

Church and state are too cozy at the Topeka Correctional Facility, according to a convicted murderer who has spent the past 23 years inside Kansas’s prison system.

Shari Webber-Dunn — who in 1994 was handed a 40-year-minimum prison sentence for her role in the murder of her estranged husband — claims in a federal lawsuit filed last week that inmates at Kansas’s only women’s prison are subjected to an endless profusion of Christian imagery and propaganda, from the material posted on bulletin boards to the movies played in the common room.

The net effect, Webber-Dunn claims, adds up to an institutional message “imposing Christian beliefs on inmates” in a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit argues the prison has created a “coercive atmosphere where inmates are pressured to spend their time in a high religious atmosphere and to participate in religious activities and prayers, thus violating the establishment clause.”

Webber-Dunn’s case is being brought by the American Humanist Association, a D.C.-based organization that says it has 34,000 members nationally and is geared toward “advancing and preserving separation of church and state and the constitutional rights of humanists, atheists, and other freethinkers.” According to the legal complaint, the inmate identifies herself as a practitioner of Thelema, a religious sect rooted in the writings of early-20th-century mystic Aleister Crowley. [MORE]