John Ragosta, Paul Finkelman and Steven K. Green, “legal scholars and historians who participated as amicus” in the recent Greece prayer case at the Supreme Court, struggled to understand what the Supreme Court intended to mean by its ruling:

The court fails, though, to explain what this means, an issue that the dissent takes up. Should prayers occur before the public is invited into the room? Should prayers be directed only at the board? Should the members themselves take turns invoking prayers, making it clear that they are personal and not “official” prayers?

These scholars missed the obvious issue that if the court, or another branch of the government, should prescribe all these details, it would engender the very entanglement it was trying to avoid. SCOTUS basically said, “let them pray.” How they choose to do so is within their liberties.

In trying to draw a distinction with “official” prayer, the three cited military chaplains:

Military chaplains provide a good example: No one would suggest that a military chaplain cannot pray with a soldier before he or she goes to battle or after in a sectarian manner — be that Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Mormon, Jewish, Hindu, etc.

Broad generalizations have never been a good legal argument. In fact, people have suggested that Chaplains not be allowed to pray with troops in a sectarian manner, even before combat missions (several times). So their example suffers right out of the gate. They continued:

Nor would anyone suggest that a voluntary prayer service couldn’t be sectarian: Catholic Mass Sunday at 10 a.m., Jewish prayer services Friday at 6:30 p.m., etc.

In point of fact, some people have attacked the content of religious and prayer services (see religious liberty critic Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, for example), even when those meetings have been voluntarily formed and attended. But to continue,

That is far different from a general meeting of enlisted persons on military topics, parts of which they must attend, convened by an officer that is opened with a prayer addressed to the soldiers.

Yes, those environments are different. But what do the authors make of this difference? They don’t. They end there, like a hanging chad.

Ultimately, the authors are very concerned about prayer, since it is now legal, being “done right.” While the majority opinion from the Supreme Court may have made some allowance for obviously inappropriate speech (degrading others, for example), it didn’t provide specific direction on how to pray precisely because it is not the government’s place to do so.

Believe it or not, the authors’ own example, had they fleshed it out, supports the SCOTUS ruling, without their angst.

Their are no laborious rules and regulations on what military chaplains may or may not do during events outside of the chapel, despite attempts by some critics to create them. Instead, they act in accordance with the tenets of their faith and pray as the situation dictates — exercising their religious liberty and protecting that of the troops they serve. It is no more complicated than that.

Why is there a great worry about what people may say during a prayer, anyway? One of the biggest threads through the Supreme Court ruling was almost a rebuke: Adults need to stop being so easily offended.

Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable; and an Establishment Clause violation is not made out any time a person experiences a sense of affront from the expression of contrary religious views…

ADVERTISEMENT

---

---