Yucca Valley has considered, and the Twentynine Palms City Council is soon to discuss, the controversial practice of starting meetings with religious prayers. Dan Stork surveys legal activity on this issue at the Federal level…
Although invocations by clergy at meeting of elected officials have been common in the United States since the earliest days of the Republic, there have been repeated challenges to the practice, on the grounds that it violates separation of church and state called for in the First Amendment to the Constitution. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right of the Nebraska legislature to open its session with a prayer (although the legislature’s chaplain agreed informally to omit sectarian references.) More recently, there have been additional challenges which focus on the sectarian content of the prayers. Earlier this year, a federal appeals court in California allowed the City of Lancaster to have references to Jesus Christ in its opening prayers, because the city also allowed Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans—whatever—to make their own specific references in the same setting. At about the same time, another federal appeals court, considering a case in Virginia, said that it wasn’t enough to say that non-Christian religions could participate, if in actual practice a large majority of the prayers had explicitly Christian references. In May of 2013, the Supreme Court agreed to hear, in its fall session, a very similar case from New York State. (In this reporter’s opinion, the circumstances in the New York case are very similar to those in Twentynine Palms.) A decision is not expected until some time in 2014.
SUPREME COURT TO LOOK AT PRAYERS AT COUNCIL MEETINGS
