Friday Column on the MO Right to Pray Amendment

Across the river, the voters of Missouri overwhelmingly passed an amendment t0 the state constitution termed the ‘right to pray’ amendment. I note a part that says that a student cannot be compelled to perform an assignment contrary to their religious beliefs. As a religious person, I am so tired of being thrown into the same pool as the authors and supports of this type of material. I want to be clear. I do support the existence of parochial religious schools. I reject the increasing claims that the public should fund these private institutions even as they provide the vital public function of education. Second, I reject the notion that public money should support religious training, or the inculcation of religious doctrine in basic subjects, but in particular natural science. My guess is that the authors of the amendment want to protect students from right wing churches from being exposed to science requirements that do not accord with their interpretation of Gen. 1. It is my fond hope that students from pacifist churches will refuse to go along with assignments supporting warfare, and for Catholic students to protest the Protestant slant of the instances of religious issues in history books. I just read a new biography of James Madison from our fine Hayner Library. Madison and Jefferson were both proud that they passed a separation of church and state law in the Virginia legislature. In his defense of the bill, Madison wrote: “we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. As the Bill violates equality by subjecting some to peculiar burdens, so it violates the same principle, by granting to others peculiar exemptions.” In the oldest piece of the Presbyterian constitution, passed the same year as the Federal Constitution, we read: “We do not even wish to see nay religious constitution aided by the civil power, further than may be necessary for protection and security, and at the same time, be equal and common to others.” Twenty years ago, the court reviewed some of the religion clause case law in Lee v. Wiseman. The Court found: In Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), the Court considered for the first time the constitutionality of prayer in a public school. Students said aloud a short prayer selected by the State Board of Regents: Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. Id. at 422. Justice Black, writing for the Court, again made clear that the First Amendment forbids the use of the power or prestige of the government to control, support, or influence the religious beliefs and practices of the American people. Although the prayer was "denominationally neutral," and "its observance on the part of the students [was] voluntary," id. at 430, the Court found that it violated this essential precept of the Establishment Clause. Separation of church and state is intended to protect both religious activity from state intrusion and the state from religious attempts to impose an orthodoxy. Merely claiming a religious exemption does not create a zone outside the basic needs of the public: health, safety, and welfare. A free society permits a multiplicity of ideas, even those uncomfortable for the interpretations of certain religious segments of our land. It is difficult for me to see how the education of our people is served to permit a zone of silence be established for religious censorship of ideas.