Do take advantage of your brand new prayer opportunities. Along with your newly created job opportunities and all your new freedoms.
The most important turn in Monday’s Supreme Court ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway—a case that probes the constitutionality of explicitly religious prayer in legislative sessions—isn’t that the courts no longer have a role in policing the Establishment Clause, or that pretty much any sectarian prayers can be offered at town meetings so long as they do not “threaten damnation, or preach conversion” to minority religions. No, I think the interesting change in the court’s posture today is that sectarian prayer in advance of legislative sessions is no longer characterized merely as “prayer.” In the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes for five justices, these benedictions are now free and unfettered “prayer opportunities.” And “prayer opportunities” are, like “job creators” and “freedoms,” what make America great.
— Let Us Pray:The Supreme Court gives its blessing for prayer at town meetings. Get ready for a lot more Jesus in your life., Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, yesterday
My Polish-Jewish-immigrant grandmother, who’s been spinning in her American-cemetery grave since yesterday morning (trust me on that), might calm down once she realizes the benefits of this new all-in-one-case body of law. Which are that town residents who’d rather not take advantage of their prayer opportunity but who do want to attend a town-government meeting can plug their iPhone earphones into their ears and enjoy some music until the policymaking stuff begins. And not have to worry about appearing rude.
Hopefully, someone will give some visual signal that the prayer opportunity is over and that everyone who didn’t grab the opportunity when it was available will have to wait until Sunday church service for another one. Although there probably isn’t a prayer that that will happen. And if all hell breaks loose before Sunday, like during the policymaking debate, that missed prayer opportunity will be regretted. My grandmother would have appreciated being forewarned.
This inexorably leads to only one place:
http://cnsnews.com/sites/default/files/images/Satan%20Photo%20Jonathan%20Smith%2C%20%20vice.jpg?1399314563
beverly
i didn’t like “forced prayer” much when i ran into it in a high school in the south i went to after being asked to leave a high school in california… where i was too liberal for them.
but it’s not a fight i would pick today, on account of us liberals are portrayed as “anti religious” and a threat to everything the religious believe makes life worth living. we probably won’t escape the label, but we ought to try not to deserve it.
i could be wrong… maybe there is a plot to force us all to go to church on sunday and pay taxes to support a church… but if it’s just a matter of shutting up for a few minutes while the hypocrites at the front of the room pretend to pray for the benefit of the religious… i think we can handle it.
It’s really, really offensive to a lot of people, Dale. I absolutely agree with you that many lawsuits of that type deal with petty, trivial things. I put the “In God We Trust” lawsuits in that category. But I’ve adopted my parents’ test on this: They enjoyed the Christmas tree on the Courthouse Plaza, the festive holiday decorations in public buildings, and such. They, and I, were fine with public schools’ having Good Friday off, to allow Christians to observe it. But they, and I, always drew a line at such things as creches and crosses on public grounds as part of Christmas season displays, because they voice the story of Christ. And these prayers at government policymaking meetings do promote Christianity. That’s a fact, so the question is: Why is this permissible under the Establishment clause? Because five members of the Supreme Court are religious Christians, seems to be the answer.
Dale, here’s an article that SCOTUSblog links to in its Roundup today that sums up the thoughts of people like me as well as those of the author: http://legalfeet.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/up-is-down-down-is-up/
Btw, Dale, beginning today I’m taking a break from blogging here at AB, and will attempt to build my new blog into something that is read by more than no one.
My position exactly, J.Goodwin!
Beverly
hope you still read my answers to your blog…
i can’t see why the creche’s offend you.. the story of “the christ child” is a rather beautiful story even if you don’t believe it is more than a story.
as for “promoting Christianity,” are you serious? no one who gets promoted to is ever influenced. most people are like you: bored and at least a little turned off.
if people become Christian… or any other religion… they learn it at home, or they aquire it from friends, or they have the kind of experience they can’t make sense of any other way.
yelling at them, or yelling at the phony christians… the supreme courtiers for example… doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but it does make us, you, look a little crazy. and it does make the simple people who hang onto religion as to a life rope worry that you may not be on their side.
in the long run, i am not sure that we liberals have anything to offer them that is as good.
another fifty dollars a month to buy more plastic toys is not going to buy them happiness. and you are not going to make them run the world.
i’d rather concentrate on fighting the bad guys. like Martin Luther King did.
Goodwin / Mann
i guess I don’t get the point: your cite shows a statue assumed to be satan, though dressed more modestly than in other depictions, with some little children looking up to him.
well, maybe the little children are that easily led. certainly some of us seem to have been led into a kind of frenzy of hate exactly the way one might suppose a real satan would have engineered it.
i never much cared for the haters on either side.
jesus, by the way, was not a big fan of public prayer.
you ought to read something about him. then you would see what the professional “christians” get wrong. and fight them on terms less likely to offend the people you think you are fighting for. you know, “the poor.”
Beverly
out of respect for you i read the “legalfeet” citation. i did not feel offended or distressed by reading opinions that differ from mine. so it is hard for me to understand the point that the not-religious or other-religious should not be made to suffer through a presentation of opinions… prayers… that differ from theirs.
let me be clear… i do not like public prayer. i do not like the Supreme Court. I do not like professional “Christians.” I don’t want to listen to nam-yo-ho-ren-ge-kyo at a private party much less a public meeting
but i don’t like much that i have to listen to at a public meeting.
my point is that making a fuss about this is playing into the hands of the people who bring it to you EXACTLY because they know you will make a fuss about it and they can turn to the “simple folk” and say, “you see, these people hate god, and they will take away from you everything you hold dear.” which, oddly, is not money.
The creche is a beautiful story, Dale, but it’s not MY story, nor my parents’ story, nor my grandparents’ story. What IS our story is that the pograms in Eastern Europe often occurred during the holiday season, the perpetrators’ singing Christmas carols all the while.
When I was about six and my sister eight, we were at my grandmother’s house during the holiday season and started singing a Christmas carol, something benign like O Tannenbaum (I san’t remember which). My grandmother, who would have protected us with her life, came running frantically into the living room, where we were, and told us to stop. We were shocked. When we told my mother, she told us that our grandmother associated Christmas time and Christmas carols with pograms and other vicious acts against Jews in her childhood hometown of Mlawa, Poland.
Please read Ruth Marcus’s Washington Post piece on the Supreme Court’s opinion, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-what-the-supreme-court-got-wrong-on-prayer/2014/05/07/7d52bf34-d5fe-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html. I just updated my post to link to it.
Finally, though, I’ll say this: In two very high-profile cases now–Citizens United and now this one–Kennedy has simply made up statements of fact about others’ opinions and understandings that almost everyone knows are false. Marcus’ piece addresses this regarding the Town of Greece, but an even better one is a post by law professor Christopher Lund at SCOTUSblog, at http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/05/symposium-town-of-greece-v-galloway-going-forward/.
We’re in serious Orwell/Lewis Carroll territory here if the Supreme Court, which although not actually a court, nonetheless is required by the Constitution to base conclusions of fact that are in dispute upon evidence in the court record. When the Court starts declaring conclusions of fact that it does not even attempt to justify on an evidentiary record and that are in fact clearly false, it’s treading into very dangerous territory for a high court in a democracy.
beverly
we are in serious orwell territory. i am sorry your family had bad experience with people calling themselves christians.
but we still need to make priorities and strategies that work. and, if we have survived, get over the tragedies of history.
i think the villain in Clockwork Orange was singing “Singing in the Rain” while he raped and murdered his victim. This does not make Singing in the Rain a “bad” movie/song.
Dale, it’s certainly true that the Clockwork Orange rapist’s singing “Singing in the Rain” while he raped and murdered his victim doesn’t make the song and movie Singing in the Rain a “bad” song and movie. But I assume–I never saw Clockwork Orange–that there was no connection between the rapist’s choice of song and what he was doing while he was singing it. In Eastern Europe there was a clear message to the choice of song during Christmas season pograms: they were purging their community of “Christ killers”; non-believers.
Btw, here’s a terrific article about this issue from a retired Montana Supreme Court justice: http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/i-will-stand-no-longer-for-prayer.
Beverly
we better quit while we’re ahead. you keep missing my point.
i don’t think there is much of a “christkiller” sentiment in America in 2014, but if you keep insisting that because of something that happened in Poland in 1934 or before, that Americans shouldn’t be allowed to sing Christmas carols in public, you can reawake that kind of hate.
the willingness to hate is always right below the surface. don’t scratch it.
Whoa, there. What in heaven’s name makes you think I’m suggesting that there’s something wrong with people singing Christmas carols in public? My grandmother didn’t want her grandchildren singing Christmas carols; she had no objection to other people singing Christmas carols, to their heart’s content, as long as they weren’t doing it as part of a government event or procedure.
My point is that government sponsorship of Christianity–and that’s what that town’s prayers are–is deeply inappropriate, because religion is none of the government’s business. And the reason it’s none of the government’s business, under the Establishment clause, is that it’s a very personal matter fraught with things are none of the government’s business.
Pray tell, on what authority does Kennedy or anyone else base his finding of fact that reasonable people who are not Christians don’t find government-sponsored Christian prayer offensive? There is by now an outpouring of people–almost all of them non-Christian or atheist–writing and saying this week that it is deeply offensive that five Supreme Court justices say they’re unreasonable. Millions of people who feel deeply uncomfortable about Christian prayer at government meetings open to the public are unreasonable? See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/the_strange_liberal_argument_that_thin_skinned_religious_minorities_should.single.html
This idea that Kennedy is entitled to simply fabricate an evidentiary conclusion in the face of no evidentiary record at all and extensive evidence to the contrary is really scary.