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Justices uphold prayer ban at schools
Public support for pre-game activity doesn’t sway court
IN THE CASE involving the school district of Santa Fe, Texas, the court said officials there had improperly set up a mechanism for holding a school election on whether to have pre-game prayers and to elect a student to deliver them over the stadium public address system.
When the policy was challenged by two families — one Catholic, one Mormon, and both objecting to the overtly Baptist nature of the prayers — the school district said it was strictly voluntary school prayer.
The court rejected that idea, finding that the prayers were given at a government-sanctioned event, using government equipment, on government property.
JUSTICES’ RATIONALE
The school district also said the event was completely voluntary, since no one is forced to attend football games. But Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said, “School districts cannot exact religious conformity as the price of attending extracurricular events.”
“School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community,” Stevens added.
“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,” he said.
The decision could carry enormous significance beyond football games or other high school sports events.
As the latest word on a politically volatile issue that has bedeviled the nation’s highest court for 40 years, the ruling offered a ringing reaffirmation of a landmark 1962 decision that outlawed organized, officially sponsored prayer in public schools.
Joining Stevens were Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
PUBLIC, POLITICAL OPINION
When the Texas case was argued in March, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of those surveyed thought students should be permitted to lead such prayers.
And in Texas’ Republican primary election last March, 94 percent of voters approved a nonbonding resolution backing student-initiated prayer at school sporting events.
Stevens said the court recognizes “the important role that public worship plays in many communities, as well as the sincere desire to include public prayer as a part of various occasions so as to mark those occasions’ significance.”
But he added: “Such religious activity in public schools, as elsewhere, must comport with the First Amendment.”
The amendment prohibits an “establishment of religion.”
The issue has also presidential potential.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the presumed Republican nominee, told reporters after the ruling that he was “disappointed” with the outcome. “I thought that voluntary student-led prayer in extracurriculars was right and important. The Supreme Court thought otherwise.” Bush had earlier filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold such student-led prayer.
Vice President Al Gore, Bush’s main rival, opposes “coerced” school prayers but supports voluntary school prayer, or a “moment of silence for individual prayer or contemplation.”
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Do you think the supreme court should have allowed these students to hold prayer before government funded extracuricular activities?(choose one)
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RESULTS SO FAR
as of 6/20/00 - 3 votes
1-yes 2-no
