Utah Bus Trips Canceled over Church-State, Insurance

August 31, 2005

  • September 1, 2005 at 2:30 am
    Thomas B. McGowan, III, J.D., says:
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    I must be getting much, much too old. And apparently my eyesight is also failing. I have clearly missed the “church-state” exclusion in the commercial auto policy. I will undoubtedly be proven wrong on this, but generally insurance is considered a matter of contract, not constitutional law. Under the same logic, the library had better get rid of the Bible, Torah, and Q’uran.
    Wait a minute! This is a joke. Right? Please tell me this is a joke.

  • September 1, 2005 at 5:10 am
    Donald Smith says:
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    My guess is the “someone” was either an ambulance chasing lawyer or a retired busy body (like me) with nothing better to do. If it was the ambilance chaser; like the poor they will always be with us. If it was a retired busy body, his or her time would be better spent finding a way to effectively deal with looters in New Orleans.

  • September 2, 2005 at 7:39 am
    Chris says:
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    The J.D. is right; the commercial auto policy (at least the ISO and its clones) has no exclusion in it for violation of the separation of church and state. To my knowledge, there isn’t even an ISO form endorsement that addresses this issue.

    The sad part is that this isn’t a joke.

    And its probably not some idle, retired busybody, at least not in the strict sense. No, someone who would complain about potential liability coverage not being in effect because a publicly funded bus trip has, as one of its stops, a place of worship, has an agenda. He/she probably couldn’t come up with any other legal, or politically correct, theory to stop the trips, so cast the pallor of “uninsured liability” into the mix.

  • September 6, 2005 at 7:50 am
    Florida Product Analyst says:
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    As a one-time resident of Utah, this actually doesn’t surprise me so much. The separation of the states of Utah and often Idaho from the LDS church is so often a hot-button issue over there, I just take it for granted. No, there oughtn’t be a question of whether there’s coverage, but it was almost inevitable that there would be a church-state separation issue arising because the insurance policy is paid for by the government.



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