The Freedom from Religion Foundation persistently opposes the city of Warren's display of a nativity scene in the city's civic center during the Hanukkah-Christmas season. They asked Mayor Fouts to remove the nativity scene and when that didn't work, in 2011, they instead asked the City to add a sandwich board sign with this message:
Mayor Fouts refused and his response to the Foundation, quoted in today's opinion (PDF) by Judges Sutton, Siler, and McKeague rejecting the Foundation's claim to a right to the display beside the nativity scene, alone is worth reading the opinion, which competes with the Fouts letter for entertaining style. From the opinion's conclusion:
To the extent the Foundation means to claim that the City’s government speech commemorating the holiday disparately treats its preferred message, the answer is: welcome to the crowd. Not everyone, we suspect, is happy with the City’s holiday display from one year to the next. And the Foundation, like everyone else, is free to urge the City to add or removesymbols from the display each year or to try to elect new officials to run the City—the customary answer to permissible government speech and the customary answer to policies with which citizens disagree. Were we to grant the Foundation’s request to add the Winter Solstice sign, moreover, that would place it in a preferred position, as no other part of the existing display contains a Madison-Avenue-like written advertisement, website included, for its stance on the holidays.
