Supreme Court Allows Prayers At Government Meetings

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that opening government meetings with a prayer in a town in New York did not violate the constitution.

In a 5-4 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the town of Greece, N.Y. did not violate the Establishment clause by sponsoring clergy who delivered sectarian prayers.

“To hold that invocations must be non-sectarian would force the legislatures sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact,” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy has historically been the court’s swing vote and wrote the majority opinion.

The vote fell along ideological lines with conservative Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas voting to allow prayer. Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayer voted against it.

In dissent, Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

The New York Times reported town officials in Greece, near Rochester, said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some of the prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.”

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion. They said the prayers offended them and, in Justice Kennedy’s words, “made them feel excluded and disrespected.”

Kagan also wrote “No one can fairly read the prayers from Greece’s town meetings as anything other than explicitly Christian – constantly and exclusively so” in the Town of Greece v. Galloway, No. 12-696.

She said the clergy “put some residents to unenviable choice of either pretending to pray like the majority or declining to join its communal activity, at the very moment of petitioning their elected leaders.”

The decision is similar to the 1983 case Marsh v. Chambers, the Supreme Court upheld the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening its legislative sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister, saying that such ceremonies were “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country,” The Washington Post reported.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins cheered the decision saying “The court has rejected the idea that as citizens we must check our faith at the entrance to the public square.”

[Image via wikipedia.org]

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