A Times Editorial

Injecting religion

Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court remains firm on not allowing schools to publicly inject a religious message during organized functions.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 21, 2000

In striking down a scheme adopted by a Texas school district that allowed students to offer an invocation over the public address system at home football games, the Supreme Court this week reaffirmed the right of students to pray whenever and wherever they feel like it, as long as their prayers aren't a formal part of a school function.

Now, is this distinction really all that hard to understand?

Is it honestly confusing to those people who run our nation's schools that students may voluntarily pray at their own initiative and prompting, but that school functions, such as a high school football game, cannot include an organized prayer, no matter who utters it? It would seem so, because this issue has been litigated for about the last 40 years, with the Supreme Court having to reiterate over and over its prohibition against school-sponsored prayer.

Of course, what's really going on is a deliberate attempt by supporters of prayer in school to sidle around these rulings. In the case of Santa Fe Independent School District vs. Doe, the Texas school district tried to persuade the court that the football game prayers weren't school-sponsored but an exercise in student free speech. After challenges to its student chaplain-led prayer practices following the 1992 case of Lee vs. Weisman, in which the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly prohibited clergy-led prayer at school functions, the Santa Fe school district set up a procedure in which students themselves voted, first to decide whether there would be an invocation and then who would give it.

But Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in the 6-3 decision, saw through the sham. "Contrary to the District's repeated assertions that it has adopted a "hands-off' approach to the pregame invocation," Stevens wrote, "the realities of the situation plainly reveal that its policy involves both perceived and actual endorsement of religion."

The delivery of such a message -- over the school's public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer -- is not properly characterized as "private speech."

Stevens also explained why a system in which a prayer is determined by a majority vote of students is obnoxious to the Constitution: "This student election does nothing to protect minority views but rather places the students who hold such views at the mercy of the majority."

The court's ruling reiterated that the Establishment Clause is intended to keep majorities from imposing their religion views on those of a different religious faith or of no faith at all. That danger is all too real in certain communities in this country, even today.

In the Santa Fe school district, the pressure either to conform to the majority's religious beliefs or remain silent was so strong that the two families that challenged the district prayer policy -- one Catholic and one Mormon -- filed their lawsuit anonymously out of fear of reprisals. Such zealous attempts were made by school personnel to ferret out the identity of the plaintiffs that a lower court had to order them to stop their "snooping."

While the decision did not explicitly apply to prayer at graduation ceremonies, the reasoning of the court is directly applicable to the graduation prayer policies adopted by the Duval County School District in Florida. Although the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has recently approved Duval's so-called student-initiated prayer, the very pitfalls of intolerant majoritarianism identified by the Supreme Court in the pre-game prayer case exist in Duval's graduation prayer practices -- where students vote to decide who shall give the "senior message."

As long as there are people who think everyone should worship the way they do, there will be attempts to inject religion into government functions. It's a good thing the U.S. Supreme Court is still willing to set things right.

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