Supreme court Approves Council Prayers

Morchella

Thinker
M
Joined
Dec 27, 2002
Messages
158
The Supreme court approved five to four today to allow city council meetings with routine christian prayer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...45f-11e3-8f7d-7786660fff7c_story.html?hpid=z1
"WASHINGTON — Prayers that open town council meetings do not violate the Constitution even if they routinely stress Christianity, a divided Supreme Court ruled Monday."
I am outraged. Did they not understand the first amendment?
Citizens United was bad enough. This court has really defecated on atheists.
What can you do in the face of mass delusion?
 
"The court said in 5-4 decision that the content of the prayers is not significant as long as they do not denigrate non-Christians or proselytize."

because praying to a specific divinity in a secular environment (town meeting with random public people), is not proselytizing. Huuuu. That sound downright insane to me.
 
Last edited:
I've never understood why a moment of silence to do whatever, including prayer, doesn't suffice. Insisting on a prayer is proseltyzing, isn't it?
 
Morchella said:
The Supreme court approved five to four today to allow city council meetings with routine christian prayer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...45f-11e3-8f7d-7786660fff7c_story.html?hpid=z1
"WASHINGTON — Prayers that open town council meetings do not violate the Constitution even if they routinely stress Christianity, a divided Supreme Court ruled Monday."
I am outraged. Did they not understand the first amendment?
Citizens United was bad enough. This court has really defecated on atheists.
What can you do in the face of mass delusion?
Click to expand...

Disrupt the prayer? Sing The Star Spangled Banner while the prayer is delivered? Let SCOTUS decide on that First Amendment issue. :)

And what does this mean?
Thomas questioned whether the constitution’s Establishment Clause applies to state and local governments.
Click to expand...
Hmm, hasn't he heard of the 14th Amendment? :confused:
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
This is what happens when right wing Christian conservatives make up the majority of the SCOTUS, though in this case the offending members are Catholic rather than Evangelical.

http://www.adherents.com/adh_sc.html
Click to expand...

Just picking nits here, but that list is a little out of date- Sonia Sotomayor (Catholic) replaced Souter (Episcopalian) in Aug 2009, and Elena Kagan (Judaism) replaced Stevens (Protestant) in Aug 2010. So the present makeup (and vote in this case) is:

Roberts- Catholic- with majority
Breyer- Judaism- minority
Ginsburg- Judaism- minority
Kennedy- Catholic - majority (wrote majority opinion)
Scalia- Catholic- majority
Thomas- Catholic- majority
Alito- Catholic- majority
Kagan- Judaism- minority (wrote dissent)
Sotomayor- Catholic- minority

It seems to me that the decision really doesn't amount to much more than a somewhat wishy-washy endorsement of the old "ceremonial deism" justification. The problem is that the folks like the Rev Trigg (in halleyscomet's link above) can't, by the nature of their religion, be satisfied with that; and this decision just gives them ammunition to aim for more. I looked at some comments on a FoxNews article about this (if you want to know what the hard-core right thinks about any given issue, comments sections at FoxNews are a good place to start); "about time! Now let's get prayer back in school!" and "this is a Christian nation! If you don't like it, get out!" predominated. Kennedy can disclaim any proselytizing intent by them all he wants, but it just isn't in the nature of religion to be satisfied with an inch if they think they can get a mile; "ceremonial deism" is meaningless as religion, which is why it's been acceptable up to this point, but also why the fundies can't stop there.
 
Letter to LA Times by me..

"Is prayer as effective an aid to decisions in city councils as open debate
without any religious overtones?
Invoking the aid of one group's unseen deity versus one (or more) of some other group is just a waste of time.
Keep it real."
 
turingtest said:
Just picking nits here, but that list is a little out of date- Sonia Sotomayor (Catholic) replaced Souter (Episcopalian) in Aug 2009, and Elena Kagan (Judaism) replaced Stevens (Protestant) in Aug 2010. So the present makeup (and vote in this case) is:

Roberts- Catholic- with majority
Breyer- Judaism- minority
Ginsburg- Judaism- minority
Kennedy- Catholic - majority (wrote majority opinion)
Scalia- Catholic- majority
Thomas- Catholic- majority
Alito- Catholic- majority
Kagan- Judaism- minority (wrote dissent)
Sotomayor- Catholic- minority
Click to expand...
The list on the link was out of date but it included all the people voting prayer was OK.

I agree the decision claimed the prayer was merely ceremonial, but they should be getting rid of these Christian ceremonies rather than saying they are OK.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
The list on the link was out of date but it included all the people voting prayer was OK.

I agree the decision claimed the prayer was merely ceremonial, but they should be getting rid of these Christian ceremonies rather than saying they are OK.
Click to expand...

Absolutely agreed. I think the intent of the decision is an attempt at even-handedness; I think the effect will be to arm folks whose basic ideology excludes even-handedness. It'll have to be dealt with again at some point.
 
ddt said:
And what does this mean?
Thomas questioned whether the constitution’s Establishment Clause applies to state and local governments.
Click to expand...

Hmm, hasn't he heard of the 14th Amendment?
Click to expand...
This ought not be a surprise to anyone. That is, it ought not to be a surprise to anyone who has been reading the idiocy that seems to flow from Justice Thomas in religious cases. Thomas has taken this position for nearly ten years now. As I wrote in the Pledge case from 2004:
Brown said:
Justice Thomas hammers this point home by going on to opine that the Establishment Clause protects states rather than individuals, and that states can establish religions if they wish to do so.
Click to expand...
In a later case, Thomas acknowledged that he had taken some flak for this position, but he did not expressly renounce it. But he stands alone in his bird-brained position:
Brown said:
Actually, Justices Scalia and Thomas part ways on some religious issues. Thomas has suggested that the very first right in the Bill of Rights (freedom from establishment of religion) is not an individual right, but a right of states. (Justice Stevens has ridiculed that notion, and no other member of the Court--not even Scalia--has spoken a word in support of it.)
Click to expand...
Even in today's decision, Justice Scalia refused to join in the part of Thomas's opinion that adhered to this foolish analysis.

As for the bit about the 14th Amendment, it has been observed that Justice Thomas MIGHT have had a point ... had the case been decided before the Civil War.

In his dissent in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005), Justice Stevens addressed Thomas's absurd position:
Indeed, to constrict narrowly the reach of the Establishment Clause to the views of the Founders would lead to more than this unpalatable result; it would also leave us with an unincorporated constitutional provision–in other words, one that limits only the federal establishment of "a national religion.' [Citation to Thomas's opinion.]. Under this view, not only could a State constitutionally adorn all of its public spaces with crucifixes or passages from the New Testament, it would also have full authority to prescribe the teachings of Martin Luther or Joseph Smith as the official state religion. Only the Federal Government would be prohibited from taking sides, (and only then as between Christian sects).

A reading of the First Amendment dependent on either of the purported original meanings expressed above would eviscerate the heart of the Establishment Clause. It would replace Jefferson's "wall of separation" with a perverse wall of exclusion–Christians inside, non-Christians out. It would permit States to construct walls of their own choosing–Baptists inside, Mormons out; Jewish Orthodox inside, Jewish Reform out. A Clause so understood might be faithful to the expectations of some of our Founders, but it is plainly not worthy of a society whose enviable hallmark over the course of two centuries has been the continuing expansion of religious pluralism and tolerance. [Authorities.]

Unless one is willing to renounce over 65 years of Establishment Clause jurisprudence and cross back over the incorporation bridge, ... appeals to the religiosity of the Framers ring hollow. But even if there were a coherent way to embrace incorporation with one hand while steadfastly abiding by the Founders' purported religious views on the other, the problem of the selective use of history remains. As the widely divergent views espoused by the leaders of our founding era plainly reveal, the historical record of the preincorporation Establishment Clause is too indeterminate to serve as an interpretive North Star.
Click to expand...
Anyway, you can read today's opinion here. There will be lots of commentators commenting on the opinion without having read it; I recommend reading it first, but not if you have recently eaten.

Now, let me put out some red-meat commentary that you might see elsewhere: Prayers are traditional, prayers are ceremonial, say the boys in black, which may of course be true. But that rather spectacularly misses the point. Prayers are also religious, and if that is not so, then so-called houses of prayer ought to lose their religious status and start paying their damned taxes.

Or how about this one: There is a lot of talk about privatizing things. Well, perhaps we ought to privatize religion. Get government out of the religion business!
 
Brown said:
...

Now, let me put out some red-meat commentary that you might see elsewhere: Prayers are traditional, prayers are ceremonial, say the boys in black, which may of course be true. But that rather spectacularly misses the point. Prayers are also religious, and if that is not so, then so-called houses of prayer ought to lose their religious status and start paying their damned taxes.
Or how about this one: There is a lot of talk about privatizing things. Well, perhaps we ought to privatize religion. Get government out of the religion business!
Click to expand...

Thank you; that better expresses the point I was struggling to make above with my "ceremonial deism" reference- that it can't be meaningless ceremony and meaningful prayer at the same time. And it's certainly a little hypocritical (at best) for these folks to pretend to others that it's the one just so they can maintain for themselves the privilege to politically proclaim the other.
 
Last edited:
Brown said:
This ought not be a surprise to anyone. That is, it ought not to be a surprise to anyone who has been reading the idiocy that seems to flow from Justice Thomas in religious cases. Thomas has taken this position for nearly ten years now. As I wrote in the Pledge case from 2004:
<respectful snip>
Click to expand...
Thank you for your explanation, that explains a lot.

Brown said:
As for the bit about the 14th Amendment, it has been observed that Justice Thomas MIGHT have had a point ... had the case been decided before the Civil War.
Click to expand...
Hm, yes, there was no 14th Amendment before the Civil War. :) Wouldn't his interpretation still have been bird-brained: most if not all of the Bill of Rights is about individuals' rights, not about states' rights?

Brown said:
Or how about this one: There is a lot of talk about privatizing things. Well, perhaps we ought to privatize religion. Get government out of the religion business!
Click to expand...
If you like football, you join a local football club, pay your fees, and go to the weekly meeting (game).
If you like science, you join the local science club, pay your fees, and go to the weekly meeting.
If you like religion, you join a local church, pay your fees, and go to the weekly meeting.

Indeed, what is special about religion compared to other clubs?
 
I think the argument is thus: Obviously the founding fathers didn't intend the first amendment to preclude a voluntary opening with a minor religious ceremony, therefore there's nothing to force down on states via 14th amendment.

I really can't align that with the actual no-establishment wording but there you go.

Basically they bailed like they do with In God We Trust.

I've never been a big fan of government insinuating itself everywhere, dragging its no-religion mandate into everything it sticks its finger into (see arguments about religious people having to support birth control), but this never seemed logical to me. It should be done elsewhere prior with whoever wants to attending.
 
Last edited:
what is special about religion compared to other clubs?
Click to expand...
.
Soccer hooligans excepted, strong religious beliefs lead to excesses.
The Salem Witch Trials here had official approval, and people died.
And Europe has long history of such problems.
I question why these educated justices haven't evaluated their childhood indoctrinations into religions, and seen that religions are 1) myths, and 2) intended to control the population, nothing more.
I guess the justices feel they are just too magnificent a creation to just stop when death comes, and are of course going on to the better land of the promises.
.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

― Thomas Jefferson "
.
As the Salem Trials showed, councilmen can do both when their faith leads their thinking.
 
Brown said:
Unless one is willing to renounce over 65 years of Establishment Clause jurisprudence and cross back over the incorporation bridge, ...
Click to expand...

We've seen this a ton over the years, Thomas doesn't care about precedent. Not only is he willing to renounce 65 years of jurisprudence, he wants to do that.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom