THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412020015
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Supporters of a constitutional amendment that would permit voluntary prayer in public schools are accused of being divisive. The shoe doesn't fit. If there's any point to the charge, it should be brought against the Supreme Court which, in 1962, ruled properly against official prayer but, subsequently, scoured schools of any trace of religious observance.
The court's rulings themselves amounted to any amendment asserting neutrality but seen as favoring unbelief over belief because any evidence of the latter had to be removed. This concept struck most Americans as novel and unacceptable. Their reaction is important and unabated; since it is their Constitution that the court is interpreting, there's good reason to proceed with an amendment as the best means of settling a controversy that the court itself carried to extremes.
The justices were asked in 1962 if a state could write a prayer for recitation in its public schools. No, said the court; and neither, it added in following cases, could teachers be required to read aloud passages from the Bible or students be required to recite the Lord's Prayer.
As Justice Black said reasonably in the initial case, Engel vs. Vitale: ``It is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as part of a religious program carried on by the government.''
Those words squared well enough with: (1) the American quest for freedom of religion, (2) the ideal of respecting the rights of minorities and (3) that part of the First Amendment assigning government a hands-off role regarding religion.
But to that other part of the Establishment Clause which prohibits government from interfering with the ``free exercise'' of religion, the court gave short shrift. Laws to permit moments of silence in classrooms were struck down as circumventions of what began as a ban on official prayers. The evil was perceived not in the effect of such laws but in the motivation of those who enacted them. This, in a word, was stupid.
The court's posture had become absolutist; with mulish rigidity, it paramounted minority opposition to any sort of religious observance over majority favor for some shred of observance. The majority was not only thwarted but lectured - in this wise: You only imagine your freedom has been diluted; your child, at any odd moment, can pray; the important thing is that the prayer not be encouraged or noticed.
This counsel has not been well-received. Opinion polls over three decades regularly have shown that 75 percent or more of Americans favor a constitutional amendment permitting prayer. Moreover, the court's decrees are widely ignored or defied. It is clear after 32 years that the court's interpretation of the Constitution has not won the general acceptance that alone justifies review by unelected judges of laws devised by popularly constituted legislatures.
Indeed, in recent times, the court itself has begun to tack away from absolutism and toward some accommodation of religious observance. Some religious groups having political fish to fry seem content with that slow retreat; others welcome a high wall of separation between state and religion, and still others want a return of state-mandated prayers and Bible readings.
None of these views, however, need figure largely in whether an amendment is submitted and voted up or down. The best case for doing that is that the court decided but did not settle a divisive question that needs to be settled. The Constitution leaves the ultimate power of interpretation to the people who live under its provisions. Let them, by the means provided, get on with it. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB