School officials in Hamilton County, Tennessee – home of Chattanooga – have halted one school's practice of starting football games with a prayer after a complaint put a spotlight on the activity. Soddy-Daisy High School's loudspeaker prayer tradition, a letter (pdf) from Freedom From Religion Foundation rightly said, "would lead anyone participating on the team or in attendance to believe that the Hamilton County School District is endorsing religion, and specifically, in this case, Christianity."
A personal favorite part of this story from the Chattanooga Free Press is the response of one school board official:
Hamilton County Board of Education member Rhonda Thurman, who represents Soddy-Daisy, said the prayers were part of the school’s tradition, and that anyone who didn’t want to hear could “put their fingers in their ears.
“Everybody is offended by something,” she said.
This argument – that students can just leave or close their ears to the sound of their government promoting a religion that is not their own – has been dispatched again and again by the Supreme Court in rulings over the past 50 years. And yet, like the villain that refuses to die in so many slasher movies, it persists, a favorite of the crowd that believe the majority should be able to trample the constitutional rights of the minority.
This is not just a matter of being offended. These are state-sponsored, taxpayer-funded events in which the government controls the microphone. They should be open to everyone, and should not be a vehicle for the personal religion of any school official to be literally broadcast as if it is the official view, or even a sanctioned one, of the state.
As long ago as Engel v Vitale in 1962, striking down public school prayer recitation , Justice Black emphasized that allowing students to leave or to remain silent does not save a violation of the Establishment Clause:
[T]he fact that the program, as modified and approved by state courts, does not require all pupils to recite the prayer but permits those who wish to do so to remain silent or be excused from the room, ignores the essential nature of the program's constitutional defects. Neither the fact that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause…
The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that….
The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its "unhallowed perversion" by a civil magistrate.
