PUBLIC PRAYER RIGHTS

[The following ran in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch on March 22, 2009.]


As a proud card-carrying member of the ACLU, I have followed with interest the efforts to compel allowance of strongly sectarian prayers by state police chaplains. Your editorial of March 9 helped to focus my thinking.

To be sure, a KKK member offering a prayer for the advancement of whites only would be repugnant almost beyond belief. You noted that the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld the firing of a state trooper who belonged to an arguably related organization. Presumably, the trooper challenged his firing on the rights of "assembly" and "expression" guaranteed in the First Amendment. He did not offer a public prayer extolling white supremacy, as your hypothetical posited.

I am struggling with the outcomes in both instances, not because I defend the conduct or associations but because I MUST defend the First Amendment. It is similar to the conflict I feel about smoking in restaurants, which I personally abhor, but I have my concerns about government prohibitions.

In the prayer situations you understandably raise, no one seems to ask what to me is a much more important question, one that questions why prayer is being offered in a public context in the first place? Prayer has no place in a secular governmental context whatsoever. If there were no such prayers, there would be no such conflict. The Wiccan priestess who incredibly (but predictably) lost her case before the Catholic-majority US Supreme Court a couple of years ago would have had no issue if there had been no prayers allowed at all at supervisor meetings.

About 6 years ago, the US Supreme Court upheld congressional content regulation of art displays funded by tax dollars. Most people applauded that predictable decision, and it brought home to me the realization that there is no "free lunch" and that all money has strings attached. The unasked question there is why should taxpayers forcibly fund any arts or humanities at all? If there were no such public funding, there could be no discrimination. Why also do we have taxpayer-funded religious chaplains?

If prayer (or comment or art display) is allowed in a public context or on public property, then I believe a government may not regulate it. I must cast my lot with the First Amendment.