Recently, in New York, two women have claimed that the public prayers at a New York town's board meetings are "overwhelmingly Christian in nature." It is obviously very difficult to construct a prayer that touches base with every religion, but I do feel like this prayer is a tradition, and it isn't as if the Supreme Court is blatantly disrespecting other religions. To minimize this issue, I believe that they should make the prayer as generic as possible, so as to not anger any other religious institutions. What do you think?
3 comments:
I think this is a perfect example of the free speech issue. America has been having this debate for years now and I'm starting to doubt that it will ever end. Religion is a very delicate matter, you can't please everybody. There will always be problems with that subject. In this case however, the State should have known better after all the free speech debates and religious issues that have happened over the past couple of years (Muhammad Youtube video, to name one) not to have put a sign like this. I'm going to pay close attention to this as I am curious to see how this will play out.
I definitely agree with Nathan that with religion, you can not please everyone. Even if they do broaden up the prayer, people who do not practice a religion will be offended. Therefore, their goal should be to try to offend the least amount of people as possible. Polls would be very helpful in determining public opinion surrounding this issue to see whether changes should be made.
I agree with both the comments above in that it's impossible to please anyone. Regardless of the sensitivity of the prayer, any form of religious expression will always draw the ire of those who disagree. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that institutionalized practices that can be construed as religious are permissible as long as they have a non-religious intent, don't appear to advance a particular religion, and don't represent an unreasonable combination of church and state. In this case, the only real secular intent is that of tradition. However, there doesn't seem to be much of a religious motive either. Does this case advance a specific religion? It seems like the variety of people called to give the invocation indicates that the practice is intended to satisfy a large variety of religious belief rather than just one religion. Is this unreasonable? That's up to the Court but I feel like this case has little merit in terms of Constitutional law. But this kind of display, although meaningful to the plaintiffs and the city, is really insignificant in the big picture of the Constitution. The city would do well, and save itself a great deal of time and money, to better avoid controversy like this. Even if it means scrapping the whole prayer thing in general and revert to their 1998 policy of opening with a moment of silence.
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