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Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional separation of church and state was violated when a school district in Texas arranged for high school students to recite prayers over the public-address system before football games.
Just how public prayer came to be associated with
American athletic events is one of those abiding mysteries.
It was none other than St. Paul, in the first epistle to
Timothy, who wrote that bodily exercise profiteth
little,
and it was none other than Jesus, as recorded
in the gospel of Matthew, who said When thou prayest,
enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door,
pray to thy Father which is in secret.
So as nearly as I can tell, neither athletic training
nor public prayer bears the New Testament stamp of
approval, which makes you wonder just how Christian
the stadium-prayer supporters really are. They're
certainly not following the teachings of the Bible.
The argument could be made that public prayers at athletic events are contrary to Christian teachings, and thus cannot be derived from those doctrines. Further, these activities do not emanate from any other religion -- at least, none that I know of. Thus, a public prayer at a tax-supported school's athletic event is not a religious exercise, and therefore it does not violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
However, certain right-thinking critics of the Supreme Court decision have taken a different course. They have moved to another clause of the First Amendment, and argue that the controversy over public prayer at a football game is really a free-speech issue.
By this theory, the students of some Texas high school select someone to speak for them before a football game. If that selected student chooses to make a public prayer rather than lead a cheer, well, those are the breaks of the game. Any attempt to limit what that student might say to the audience is an infringement on the student's rights to free expression, and is thus a violation of the First Amendment.
This sounds plausible at first, but I don't think the right-thinkers really want to pursue this.
For starters, the First Amendment protects the right of each of us the right to say what's on our minds. It does not require the government to provide a captive audience, and yet I read that students who did not volunteer for football (band members and cheerleaders, for instance) are required to attend the games.
So this isn't a free voluntary association like a church, where you can just get up and leave if you want. There's an element of coercion from a state-controlled school system that extends well beyond the football players who are getting their character built so they can to on to get under-the-table payments from college athletic boosters.
This is a variant of the arguments usually made by
certain liberals, who confuse refusal to subsidize
with censorship.
Not allowing a public prayer at a
state-sponsored event in a government facility with some
compulsory attendance is not the same as not allowing a
street preacher to mount a soapbox in a corner of a park.
The first is refusal to subsidize, the second is
censorship.
There's a second reason that the right-thinkers should not pursue the free-speech argument that the selected student has the right to say whatever is on her mind before the football game.
Suppose she believes that nude dancing is a constitutionally protected form of expression. Will the right-thinkers defend her bumps and grinds with the same vigor that they promote her right to say a prayer before the game?
I seriously doubt that. Nor do they seem likely to defend her right to quote from the speeches of Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, Jeannette Rankin and Robert Ingersoll, rather than offer a Protestant prayer.
So the critics of the Supreme Court's decision -- among them William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States -- seem dead wrong, and the court made the proper decision. But I feared I might have missed something, so I called a friend, a recovering Texan.
The court got it dead wrong,
he said. I pressed
for details.
What they didn't get was that down there, a lot more
folks go to the game on Friday night than to church on
Sunday morning, and in a small town, the coach's word
carries more weight than any dozen sermons. In Texas,
high-school football is itself a religion, pretty much an
official established state-supported religion, and the
court didn't touch that one at all.
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