Tag: prayer
A Missed Chance On Religious Freedom

A Missed Chance On Religious Freedom

WASHINGTON — To understand why religious freedom matters, put yourself in the position of someone who is part of a minority faith tradition in a town or nation that overwhelmingly adheres to a different creed. Then judge public practices by how they would affect the hypothetical you.

This act of empathy helps explain why religious liberty in the United States is such a gift. It is based, as Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent to Monday’s public prayer decision, on “the breathtakingly generous constitutional idea that our public institutions belong no less to the Buddhist or Hindu than to the Methodist or Episcopalian.”

Religious liberty will not disappear because of the court’s 5-4 ruling that the government of Greece, NY, could begin its town board meetings with prayers — even though, as Kagan put it, “month in and month out for over a decade,” they were “steeped in only one faith,” in this case Christianity.

But the court majority not only failed the empathy test but also lost the opportunity Kagan offered to find a balance that would both honor religion’s role in American public life and safeguard the rights of those whose faith commitments diverge from the majority’s.

The facts of the case are straightforward. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his own dissent, from 1999 to 2010, at more than 120 of Greece’s town board monthly meetings, only four opening prayers were delivered by non-Christians. The four exceptions, Breyer pointed out, all “occurred in 2008, shortly after the plaintiffs [in the case] began complaining about the town’s Christian prayer practice.”

The court ruled that the government of Greece had not violated anyone’s rights. “Ceremonial prayer,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, “is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government to alter or define and that willing participation in civic affairs can be consistent with a brief acknowledgement of their belief in a higher power, always with due respect for those who adhere to other beliefs.”

The town was justified, Kennedy argued, in drawing on clergy from houses of worship within its boundaries, which happened to be Christian. Greece’s non-Christians worship at congregations outside its borders.

For Kagan, this was an inadequate rationale, and she asked the essential questions: Would Christians living in a predominantly Jewish town feel their rights were protected if all public functions were presided over by a rabbi leading Jewish prayers? “Or assume officials in a mostly Muslim town,” she suggested, “requested a muezzin to commence such functions, over and over again, with a recitation” of a traditional Muslim blessing?

Nonbelievers (and others uneasy with any link between religion and government) might fairly contend that putting an end to all such public religious invocations is the simplest solution to these difficulties. But Kagan was seeking a middle way. She thus rejected “a bright separationist line.” A town hall, she said, “need not become a religion-free zone.” Instead, “pluralism and inclusion … can satisfy the constitutional requirement of neutrality.”

And in insisting on the importance of bringing in minority religious voices, you might say that Kagan took faith more seriously than did Kennedy. Religious expressions can never be merely ceremonial, she wrote, because they are “statements of profound belief and deep meaning.” Yes, they are.

In the years since the court’s 1962 decision banning government-directed prayer in public schools, we have engaged in a fierce culture war over the role of religion in our public institutions. The school prayer decision has properly stood because it sought to protect against a form of government coercion. But friends of religion have charged that driving all vestiges of faith from every other corner of the public square was itself exclusionary behavior.

Kagan’s pluralism principle would avoid this by allowing citizens of all faiths to be heard, and ways could be found to apply it to nonbelievers. It lays the groundwork for a compromise that will be imperative as immigration and declining affiliation render our country more religiously diverse. Religion would continue to have a place in our public institutions, but they would have the obligation to respect differences over “profound belief and deep meaning.”

In contrast to a legal regime insufficiently alive to the rights of minorities and dissenters, Kagan’s approach would provide religion with a public role at once more stable and more sustainable. Its day will come.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons

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Supreme Court Upholds Christian Prayers At City Council Meetings

Supreme Court Upholds Christian Prayers At City Council Meetings

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday that city councils and other public boards are free to open their meetings with an explicitly Christian prayer, ruling that judges may not act as “censors of religious speech” simply because the prayers reflect the views of the dominant faith.

The 5-4 decision rejected the idea that government-sponsored prayers violate the Constitution if officials regularly invite Christian clerics to offer the prayers.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the court, said prayers and invocations have been a routine feature of legislatures and city councils throughout American history, and he said the court was unwilling to set specific limits on those prayers.

The 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment of religion” does not require “that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God,” the decision states. To enforce such a requirement would mean judges would have to review the prayers and “act as supervisors or censors of religious speech.”

“Once it invites prayer into the public sphere, government must permit a prayer giver to address his or her own God or gods as conscience dictates, unfettered by what an administrator or judge considers to be non-sectarian,” Kennedy wrote in Town of Greece v. Galloway.

The ruling upholds the prayers offered regularly at town meetings in Greece, New York. Two women, one Jewish and the other atheist, had sued after attending a series of public meetings that featured a prayer to Jesus Christ.

While Kennedy’s opinion upholds these prayers, he said a city would go too far if the prayers “denigrate non-believers or religious minorities, threaten damnation or preach conversion.” This “would present a different case,” he said.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. formed the majority.

Justice Elena Kagan spoke for the four dissenters and faulted the court for “allowing the Town of Greece to turn its assemblies for citizens into a forum for Christian prayer.”

“When citizens of this country approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as members of one faith or another. And that means that even in a partly legislative body, they should not confront government-sponsored worship that divides them along religious lines,” Kagan concluded.

Photo: Vicki’s Pics via Flickr

Kindergartner Says She Was Stopped From Prayer Over Lunch

Kindergartner Says She Was Stopped From Prayer Over Lunch

By Lauren Roth, Orlando Sentinel

A Florida five-year-old who said she was stopped from praying over her school lunch has become a cause for a Texas-based religious liberty law firm.

Marcos Perez posted a video last week on YouTube showing his daughter, a kindergartner at Carillion Elementary in Oviedo, Fla., saying she was confronted when she bowed her head to pray at lunch.

“The lunch teacher said, ‘You’re not allowed to pray,’” said the girl, whose name has not been released by the family. “I said, ‘It’s good to pray.’ She said, ‘It’s not good.’”

The family said the incident happened during the week of March 10. Seminole County Public Schools officials say the principal, Analynn Jones, spoke to staff that could have been in the cafeteria at the time and could not find any evidence the incident occurred.

She was not contacted by Perez until late last Tuesday night, after the video had been posted, school officials said. She responded Wednesday.

Jones made it clear to staff that students do have the right to pray in school, said district spokesman Michael Lawrence.

“We don’t have a policy against student prayer at all,” he said. Both Lawrence and the parents’ lawyer said the staff member allegedly involved has not been identified to them.

After seeing the YouTube video, which was reported on by websites including theblaze.com, the Liberty Institute of Plano, Texas, contacted Perez and offered to represent the family.

The law firm is asking for an apology and a better investigation.

“The principal has pretty much dismissed this,” said Jeremiah Dys, a Liberty Institute lawyer working with the family. “The School Board really needs to take into consideration that students can pray over lunch in school.”

Lawrence said that because none of the adults recalled the incident occurring, the district must consider the possibility that “a child that age may have misinterpreted something.”

School officials have not interviewed the girl, who has been pulled from kindergarten at Carillon by her parents, who said they intend to home school her.

Her father is vice president of sales at Charisma House, a Lake Mary, Florida-based Christian book publisher. The company is currently promoting the book “God Less America: Real Stories from the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values,” by Todd Starnes.

Dys said his law firm has not investigated the incident independently but has full faith in the child’s account.

“I don’t think a five-year-old girl is going to create or concoct a story like this,” he said.

Dow Constantine, King County Executive via Flickr