Seems like the First Amendment is clear cut. It states Congress shall make no laws establishing religion. This is the operative clause of the sentence. To me, this means there are no federal laws saying it is illegal to not participate in an official state religion, i.e you gotta pay taxes cause that's the law, but you don't hav'ta go to state church on Sunday. Not sure this is a great example, but this could be compared to mandatory DUI school attendance as part of a judge's ruling in the case of drunken driving. It's the law you attend as part of the deal. This law is on the books, and not a judge's interpretation.
Concerning removing prayer from school. Imo, there is no constitutional basis for this. Congress has not legislated mandatory prayer in public schools, in accordance with the first amendment. A public school principal doesn't have the law making authority to become involved one way or the other, neither enforcing nor denying prayer. This is why we have a Congress, made up of representatives and senators, so power is not invested in a single person, such as a school principal.
It would seem to make more sense, to allow individual communities to deal with the prayer issue as they see fit, and this would be in complete accordance with another right as mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the freedom of assembly...the right of like minded citizens to assemble in the pursuit of whatever peaceable and lawful agenda they choose...life, liberty and happiness.
This is a great country, where people have freedom to live anywhere they feel community standards are suited to their personal philosophy and beliefs. If a community is predominantly Christian, for example, does it not violate constitutional spirit to deny prayer in public schools? What about in a Muslim community, where prayer is a religious requirement for orthodox Muslims.
I believe parents should be the guiding authorities, where school officials, working together with the PTA, set guidelines. This is where the most amicable solutions could be worked out, to accomodate everyone's religious concerns. I see a big problem with the idea of a centralized, federal bureaucracy setting the same standards for all public schools. If anything, this is detrimental to education, dulls the edges of thinking, and dismisses individuality as irrelevent. Outcome based education is an example. And if you need an example of good schools, look no further than religious schools.
From my somewhat limited experience with all this, I gather that the real issue has little to do with prayer offending or fomenting conflict among diverse religions. But rather it is a power exercise played out in the courts, somewhat like a game of chess, with lawyers as the pawns running defense and setting up moves for the royal court of Federal and Supreme court justices.
It is also my opinion that those who initiate the lawsuits, are, for the most part, more interested in causing trouble than they are with seeing justice done.
Les
