A California church is suing after their county clerk dropped the place of worship as a polling location last year because they refused to remove signs that proclaimed, “Black Lives Matter.”

The incident began last year, when a voter complained that the church had set up the signs, sparking a back and forth between county clerk Brandi Orth and the leaders of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno.

The voter enquired: “why it was okay to have Black Lives Matter (a known domestic terrorist group) sign in front of our polling place,” according to court documents. The US does not classify Black Lives Matter as a domestic terrorist group.

After the county clerk asked for the signs to removed, church leaders, who serve a congregation of about 450 people in a mostly white part of town, refused to take down the pair of yellow banners that stand 200 feet from their building — a distance that is outside of the 100-foot radius where state law prohibits “electioneering”.

That refusal led the county clerk to drop the church as an official polling place, just a month before the 2018 midterms.

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Reverend Tim Kutzmark told The Washington Post that, regardless of the 100-foot radius rule, the signs were not electioneering, or even a political statement.

“They are a theological statement,” Mr Kutzmark said.

The church has now filed a complaint against the county clerk, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. A complaint filed on Monday says that the county clerk’s actions “violate the First Amendment by singling out [the church’s] messages for disfavour because of the views expressed in those messages.”

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“The Church’s Black Lives Matter banners were not electioneering,” the complaint says. “They did not advocate for or against any candidate or measure on the ballot, and they were displayed more than 100 feet from the polling place at the Church.”