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| Witchvox Chapter: Wren's Nest News | Chapter Page Views: 56,553,767 |
 Group Issues SE Request To End Prayer At Graduation Author: Jona Ison Source: Chillicothe Gazette (OH) Title: GROUP ISSUES SE REQUEST TO END PRAYER AT GRADUATION Southeastern Local Schools has received notice from a Washington group that it would be a violation of the Establishment Clause to include a prayer at the graduation ceremony. Traditionally, the school has had a reverend deliver an invocation and benediction at the ceremony, but the practice recently was challenged by senior Jacob Davis. Davis, who raised his concerns in a Letter to the Editor at the Chillicothe Gazette, had conducted a petition of classmates for a moment of silence instead, gathering about 44 signatures. Principal Leonard Steyer was prepared to make a decision about the prayer Friday when he received a copy of a letter faxed to the district Thursday by a staff attorney for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. | |
| Community Thoughts: There are 1 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| SCOTUS, Fraud Or Paradox? | May 11th. at 3:33:29 pm EDT |
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Terry (Irvington, Virginia) - Email Me Banning all prayer imposed at government functions and via compelled attendance (including "by choice" to exercise other rights, as in litigation or public meetings) government functions is the only way to seriously deliver both religious neutrality and equal protections of law. Our Supreme Court, in the 1983 "Marsh" precedent, established what is both a fraud and a paradox, to the detriment of other courts and the rule of law. It pretended that a notion that's effectively "Protestant lite" called "non-sectarian" prayer exists, and can be religion neutral, and inclusive of all Americans and our civil rights. Then and now, legal fact is that set of assumptions are simply untrue. Neither were they true in Colonial times used as the basis for "original intent", though diversification, immigration, and ending denial or rights to "Indians not taxed" and other minorities have made the legal fact of assuming everyone is of a sectarian religion far less true today. Sects historically meant ones like Anglican/Episcopalian, Congregational, Baptist, etc. Not included are humanists, atheists, shamanics, Eastern monastic and non-monastic paths, etc. Not included are paths or for that matter, sects, that believe it's wrong to publicly pander prayer. The only way to honestly and functionally comply with the stipulated conditions whereby "Marsh" held generic prayers to be lawful in public functions is to ban them outright. That's true in part because of those who cannot be included in practices they hold as wrong to subvert into public spectacles, or whose traditions exclude prayer. That's true in part due to sects that hold any prayer not invoking their special imaginary friends to be profane. That's true in ways whereby the very construct of "non-sectarianism" is a fraud, and it's true because in a society as diverse as ours has become, the only way of being neutral and inclusive requires government not hosting or imposing practices that are divisive and exclusionary, not just based on what prayers are or are not favored or denied the podium, but if any are. In that respect, the real question is, did "Marsh" create a paradox that could be seen as valid law whose implementation sets conditions to outright ban what it facially allows, or was "Marsh" little more than a pig in lipstick, an outright fraud that knowingly ignored key legal fact to excuse malicious violations of the core standards for US civil rights law? As to specifics of this article, when school admins select which students speak, and advise them on traditional event content criteria, that's far from an "open forum" where the results are in fact individual speech. It's a thinly veiled guise for pretending government regulated and imposed content is somehow other than that, in the postures of dishonest manipulators like ADF or Liberty U predator cults and their legal postures to promote specific religious dogma. That should be seen for what it is, while government is held to its own rules to follow the underlying principles of our Constitution, not pathetic excuses to circumvent them. |
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