SALISBURY, NORTH CAROLINA, USA, February 19, 2012 (Salisbury Post): The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to let stand a ruling that Forsyth County commissioners’ opening prayers are unconstitutional is rippling across the state as other governments examine their own practices. The nation’s highest court declined in January to hear an appeal to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2011 ruling that prayers to open Forsyth County board meetings were too overwhelmingly Christian. That decision led the American Civil Liberties Union to call on other government bodies to adhere to the ruling and end sectarian prayer.
The Forsyth County prayer fight stretches back to at least 2006. According to reporting by the Winston-Salem Journal, the ACLU asked commissioners in October of that year to stop opening meetings with prayer “invoking the name of Jesus Christ.” and adopt a policy banning sectarian prayers. Beginning in late 2009, the county lost successive court rulings and appeals in federal and district courts, then in the 4th Circuit Court, where the majority opinion said that even though the county’s policy was to invite local religious leaders to pray “according to the dictates of their faith” but to avoid proselytizing or disparaging other faiths, the prayers were still unconstitutional because they “referred to Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, or Savior with overwhelming frequency.”
When the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to that ruling, it essentially let stand the court’s landmark 1983 decision — in a case involving the Nebraska state legislature and its paid chaplain — that there’s nothing wrong with opening governments meeting in prayer, as long as the prayer doesn’t favor one religion over another. Parker, the ACLU legal director, puts it this way: “A reference to a general god is considered nonsectarian. What’s sectarian is when someone references a deity in whom only a particular religion believes.”
To groups like the ACLU, though, diversity may be no substitute for nonsectarianism, especially at meetings where government policy is made. “If a Hindu gives a prayer and prays to Vishnu, that’s a sectarian prayer,” said Parker, the ACLU legal director.