On Mon, March 26, 2007 12:42 am, Ralph Shumaker wrote: > Lan Barnes wrote: > >>Nobody is trying to stamp out religion in politics, prayer in school, or >>any other religious freedom. What people like me want to stop is enforced >>religious observation, no matter how benign. As Molly Ivins used to point >>out, there's plenty of prayer in schools, especially just before math >>tests. What is NOT acceptible is that any publicly funded school REQUIRE >>any kids (or faculty, for that matter) to pray to anything. >> >> > > ... *or* "REQUIRE any kids (or faculty, for that matter)" NOT to > publicly do so on publicly funded property. >
The courts have ruled, I think with some wisdom, that almost all of these "voluntary" pray-with-me events have applied enough psychological pressure to not pass a reasonable person's definition of voluntary. I don't know if any cases have been referred in which the prayer event is more clearly voluntary. If, for example, the valedictorian said at the start of her speech, "Right after graduation I plan to thank Jesus in the south east corner of the cafeterria, and if anyone wants to join me, I'd be real tickled": well, I can't see any court banning that very personal invitation. But consider this: You're 16 or 18 and just made the varsity football squad, and in the locker room before your first real game, the coach suddenly says "Let's pray to Jesus for victory," and everybody drops to one knee, bows, and thrusts their hands into a circle; are you going to hang back and say "aw, come ON, give me a freaking break!", no matter what your true feelings? (Actually, I did stuff like that in my high school, where we still had mandatory bible classes, and it was a source of constant friction. So when I talk about Paul being anti-sex and anti-woman, I do so from a position of someone who has read all the epistles, albeit at gun point.) BTW, I put Jesus in both my examples not because I have anything against him or people who see his as a savior, but because I wanted to make it clear that there was sectarian content. It could as well have been "to Allah" or "to the Earth Mother." But even unitarian/deist feel-good prayers to no one in particular are kind of offensive to a secular humanist like me who believes that people need to take responsibility for their own futures, rather than fobbing it off on the supernatural. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
