Forget all the cliches about hard-bitten, unflappable newspaper reporters. We are, by nature and training, a hyperventilating species with short memory. We are just dying to tell you the latest tidbit we’ve heard, and tell you why it is so important.
So it causes me some discomfort to offer the following analysis:
The big school prayer ruling issued by the U.S. Supreme Court this week is, in its direct effect, not very big at all.
The court has ruled on so many school prayer cases over the years that Santa Fe Independent School District vs. Jane Doe is not going to rip the spiritual foundations out from under America’s youth, or silence millions of currently offered petitions from the nation’s public schools.
This decision is hemmed in on one side by previous rulings that protect a student’s right to pray on his own, pretty much anywhere and anytime, and allow schools to provide moments of silence.
It is hemmed in on the other side by cases that determined that school administrators may not make kids recite sectarian prayers or force them to listen to clergy pray out loud.
This ruling says that a school may not hold a particular kind of election to choose a single student to offer weekly invocations, with certain guidelines, over the school’s public address system, before high school football games. In other words, it is not going to apply to many people.
But listen to the reaction the majority opinion elicited from Chief Justice William Rehnquist and two fellow dissenters:
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“Even more disturbing than its holding is the tone of the Court’s opinion; it bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.”
Why would the dissenters loose such grand rhetoric at such a small target?
Some observers have accused Rehnquist of hyperventilating a little bit himself. Indeed, to a legal layman, it is hard at first to spot the bristling hostility in Justice John Paul Stevens’ majority opinion.
A closer reading of Stevens’ 14-page analysis makes you wonder, though.
Stevens worries about students who don’t want to pray being placed “at the mercy of the majority.” He repeatedly refers to the “immense social pressure” these beleaguered teens feel, finally lamenting: “The choice between whether to attend these games or to risk facing a personally offensive religious ritual is in no practical sense an easy one.”
Santa Fe’s high school, one concludes, must be serving up some righteous fire and brimstone over the P.A. system.
But as the dissenters point out, this case is not based on any actual evidence of unconstitutional praying. It is all about a policy, as yet untested, that allows unspecified pre-game “messages” to encourage solemnity, sportsmanship and safety.
What the Supreme Court majority did in this case was to sniff out the possibility that such a policy might at some future date be twisted to allow unconstitutional prayer. Once on the scent, the majority began baying.
“The mechanism encourages divisiveness along religious lines in a public school setting, a result at odds with the Establishment Clause” of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the opinion declares.
“The religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the State affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer,” it concludes.
That may not be bristling hostility, but it certainly is an acute state of nervous sensitivity to any chance that somebody might be unwillingly exposed to prayer. And that would be a justifiable bias, if the 1st Amendment stopped after the clause “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … “
But it doesn’t. It goes on to say, ” … or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As so often in recent decades, the court that is terrified of establishment seems comparatively blase about free exercise of religion.
The 1st Amendment creates a difficult balance. One person’s free exercise of religion often seems to intrude on another’s conscience. And almost any time government steps in to protect the exercise of religion, it looks to somebody else like preferential treatment, which spurs concerns about government endorsement, and ultimately the establishment of a state religion.
On the other hand, free exercise of religion is why this country was founded.
Religious freedom in America may not suffer greatly if football games in Santa Fe, Texas, begin without a prayer over the loudspeaker.
But think again about the tone this opinion sets, or, more accurately, reinforces. If there is anybody more vulnerable than teenagers to immense pressures, deep-seated fears and a desire to conform at all costs, it is public school administrators with an eye on possible litigation.
The easy solution, as bureaucrats in every arm of government have shown, is to shun any manifestation of religion.
That is not a big story, but a series of little ones that play out over and over across the country. Few make headlines, and fewer still make it to the Supreme Court.
But each one is one more pebble dropped into that delicate constitutional balance. Enough pebbles, the dissenting justices seem to be warning, and the free exercise of religion will be dangling out of reach.
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