NO TO PRAYER IN GOVERNMENT FUNCTIONS...

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow prayer before government meetings is troubling on many levels (Greece v. Galloway).

The First Amendment to our Constitution prohibits governmental endorsement of a religion; in essence sponsoring a national religion.

The arguments against prayer stated that the city council had mostly Christians give the prayer but the council was open to prayers by people of any other religion or belief system and so, to me, it did not violate the First Amendment as endorsing a specific religion.

To me, a better argument would be, why is a governmental body even dealing with religion? Our Constitution dictates a separation of church and state which means government does not mess with religion in any way; their job is to govern but they are free to pray in their CHURCH and NOT at public functions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that legislative prayer has a long history in this country and that the original framers of the Constitution considered legislative prayer a benign acknowledgement of religion’s role in society.

In actuality, the Founding Fathers were deists and did not believe in religion, just a supreme being of some sort and legislative prayers were basically calling on a supreme being to guide the members of government in their deliberations.

Using “tradition” as an argument for allowing legislative prayer is risky since not all traditions are good when viewed by today’s societal standards. At the outset, Americans were predominantly Christians even though there were many Christian denominations that did not see eye to eye with each other.

Today, even though the United States is still very religious, there are big changes already present with a growing population of atheists and secularists who don’t want any religion interfering in their lives and that has to be recognized as a growing trend no matter how things were in the beginning.

It is no secret that those members of the city council were trying to cram THEIR religion down the throats of people that came to the meeting for a civil purpose NOT TO FUCKING PRAY.

The problem with the very misguided Supreme Court decision is that it sets a precedent for other religious nuts in power to keep religion in the sphere of the governmental body.

Judges Scalia and Thomas even went so far as to say that the court has improperly limited state governments’ ability to support religion and that is in DIRECT opposition to the First Amendment.

Since the Supreme Court has the final authority on these issues, we have nowhere else to turn. We can only vote against politicians and political parties that when elected nominate social conservatives to the Supreme Court…all we needed was one vote to turn this issue the other way…maybe a different Supreme Court will see the error in this decision and repeal the dumb thing!