If student's are behind it, there would be no governmental motivation, besides allowing students to express themselves.
Concededly, student-initiated prayer is a trickier issue than prayer initiated by a teacher or administrator. If a group of students want to get together during lunch and pray quietly in a corner or empty classroom somewhere, I don't see a big problem with that. But if you're talking about broadcasting a prayer over the school's PA system every morning, and forcing all students to listen to it, then that crosses the line and puts the state's imprimatur on an expression of religious faith, which clearly constitutes the establishment of religion.
No it doesn't. If it did, the Supreme Court would be limited to repeating the sentences within the Constitution.
This seems to be a fundamental point of disagreement in a number of your responses, so let's try to get it all out of the way here. The Supreme Court
interprets the Constitution. The Court's interpretation is
legally binding, regardless of whether we agree with it. The only legal meaning that any Constitutional provision, or statute, has is that which the Court gives it. If five Justices of the Supreme Court say that "respecting an establishment of religion" means government action that 1) lacks a secular purpose, 2) advances or inhibits religion, or 3) results in an entanglement between government and religion, then that's what the phrase means.
That's not to say, of course, that we're precluded from arguing that the Supreme Court's interpretation is a
bad one, or from urging the Court to change its mind. My point here is that there is no objective, Platonic "meaning" behind the Constitution other than what the Supreme Court gives it. If you want to argue for another interpretation, you have to do so on the basis of policy, not by appeal to some higher authority than the Court. You have made some such arguments in this thread, and note that I responded to those with policy-based arguments. But the idea that there is some authoritative interpretation of the Constitution beyond the Supreme Court's rulings is simply false.
Right. Probably no activity, actual or imaginable, is unificative to everybody.
So, again, why condone or permit a government-sponsored activity that is going to create ingroups and outgroups on the basis of religious belief? Isn't it better to leave the government out of it entirely?
Nor is their a Constituional prohibition of school prayer (now it's your turn to say that there is because the Supreme Court says so, I can't do any better than repeat myself and vice versa).
Yes, there is, because the Supreme Court says so. Hopefully my comments above regarding the Supreme Court as ultimate arbiter of Constitutional meaning will move the discussion of this point forward, so that we're not both just repeating ourselves.
I must take heart in the fact that the Supreme Court has been wrong in the past, and I will take heart that other men, greater and more moral than myself, have taken stands against the Supreme Court in the past. I am content with my position.
"Wrong" in comparison to what? Yes, the Court has made many decisions that were "bad" from a particular standpoint of policy preferences. The Court has reversed many of its own decisions. Again, we're free to argue about which interpretations of the Constitution would best advance certain social preferences, and to urge the Court to adopt our views. But the fact remains that the Supreme Court's rulings are the
only authoritiative interpretation of what the Constitution actually means (aside from the interpretations of the lower courts, which are authoritative only insofar as they do not contradict a ruling of the Supreme Court). If the court reverses itself, then, yes, the Constitution now means something different. That's just the way it goes.
(To offer a bit of ammunition to your rebuttal, the view I'm defending here is essentially that of legal realism/positivism articulated by Oliver Wendell Holmes and H.L.A. Hart. An alternate view exists, defended most prominently by Ronald Dworkin, that legal interpretation is bound by "natural law" and "morality," such that the Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of Constitutional meaning. With due respect to Professor Dworkin, I've never found that view very persuasive).
Religious debate? It's a secular vs. religious debate, isn't it?
Is this anything other than a purely semantic point? I am referring to the ongoing cultural debate about which, if any, religious viewpoint is the correct one. However you want to characterize it, this seems to me to be a debate in which the government should refrain from taking sides, and, as it happens, the Constitution (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) agrees with me.
The federal government ought not establish religion. I got that just fine. The Constitution did not *compel* the Supreme Court to rule as they did, or do. If that was true, that the Constitution did *compel* justices to rule in a certain way, we could nominate dogs and meatballs for the Supreme Court. Enter punchline here.
I don't understand your point. The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. Could it rule in a manner other than it has in the past? Of course it could; many cases are decided on 5-4 majorities in which a single Justice could have swung the Court in the other direction. That doesn't undermine the fact that the Court's majority opinions are the only binding interpretations of the Constitution.
Hitchens is forever bringing up Jefferson in interviews; Jefferson is celebrated as a man of contradictions, a glorified hypocrite. I'm sure Jefferson said just about everything; he also said that all men were created equal and owned slaves. Which is understandable, given the times he lived in (actually I don't believe that, but it's sure a nice phrase, isn't it!). I'll take Quincy Adams, who had to be practically gagged and bound as a Congressman. Poor guy wasn't as amenable to the decrees of the Supreme Court either. He just fought the good fight is all.
I really have no idea. I was hoping someone else would jump in with more information about Hitchens's assertion that the Constitution omitted references to God on purpose, because I have only a vague memory of what he said at TAM.
If the state is not making any law about state prayer, for or against, or enforcing any law about state prayer, for or against, I still don't see how it applies.
Public schools are agencies of the state, and therefore actions taken by public school administrators constitute state actions. If the state (in the form of the public school) is compels students to participate in a religious activity, that action is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, made applicable to the states (and thereby to the public school system) by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Edit: From your reply to gnome:
Other people, notably high school students, may argue that it doees serve a beneft. *And if they don't, then it's a non-issue*.
Since when do we allow high school students to determine their own curriculum? If religious expression is so important to these students, why can't they do it on their own time, after school, rather than intruding on educational time with non-academic activities?
