By Sid Salter, Editor, Scott County Times (Forest, MS)

April 1996 – I believe in the separation of church and state. What I have a problem with is the separation of the church from the state.

The courts tell us that our children can pray before school, after school and silently in school. But they can’t pray at the school during school – unless they’re attending their graduation exercises and even then, the kids have to initiate the prayers. The school can’t do that.

The bottom line: if you want to pray on government property, be quiet or get back in the closet where you belong. Federal judges say that course of action is dictated by the United States Constitution. They base that on judicial thinking developed over the past 30 years and suggesting that our Founding Fathers didn’t seek merely to guarantee us a freedom of religion, but also a freedom from religion.

This from the same federal judicial system that also relies on the U.S. Constitution to tell us that people who are gay or lesbian cannot be restricted from the free expression and, to a degree of appropriate propriety, free exercise of the gay lifestyle on government property, in the military, on the faculties of public schools.

In other words, public displays of sexual preference and orientation by an individual or group on government property, “Yes”; public displays of religious preference or orientation on government property, “No.”

The court’s assumption is that the practice of religious prayer is only a group event and that students who wish to pray must do so silently or not at all so as not to inflict those prayers on others.

But religious preference, like sexual preference, is an individual choice as well as a group dynamic. To suggest that one individual liberty outweighs the other in terms of the Constitution is ludicrous.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans recently affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate of Jackson that struck down the Mississippi law authorizing school prayer. He said the state could allow prayer only at commencement exercises and then only if students initiate those prayers.

Other forms of school prayer, including chapel programs, assemblies, pregame prayers at athletic events and the like, were ruled unconstitutional.

Mississippi’s school prayer law authorized “invocations, benedictions, and non-sectarian, non-proselytizing, student-initiated, voluntary prayer at school events, compulsory as well as non-compulsory.”

The challenge to Mississippi’s school prayer law was brought by David Ingebretsen, state director of the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of himself, his daughter and a group of plaintiffs.

In arguing the case, ACLU lawyer Robert McDuff told the appeals court: “This is not a case of free speech or whether students can pray in school. They can. They can pray voluntarily before school, in lunch rooms, after school in prayer clubs or even silently in class.”

In other words, pray silently or get back in the closet where you belong.

History clearly proves our founding fathers opened the government’s business each day with prayer and indeed used the government’s buildings as makeshift churches in Washington. We ignore history to extrapolate from the U.S. Constitution 200 years later that those men meant to prohibit public prayer on government property.

The whole question boils down to the separation of church and state. But in reality, this ruling is another step toward separating the church from the state.

Certainly, no one’s ever been arrested praying aloud on the street corners. But we are told in this ruling that the prayers we are free to ignore on the street corners can’t be prayed and accepted or ignored in a public school football stadium before a Friday night high school football game.

The ACLU says there is no such thing as voluntary school prayer. One wonders if the ACLU believes there is any such thing as voluntary acceptance of racial integration in the schools, gay rights in the schools and the like.

The separation of church and state and the prohibitions of the church from controlling the state – that tenet of individual liberty was never intended to suggest that the two entities could not coexist on government property.

The linkage of free speech and religious freedom in the school prayer fight is a convenient one for opponents of school prayer, but those opponents are hard-pressed to demonstrate harm when the issue is something as simple as a pregame invocation.

Students who don’t pray aren’t punished, restricted or otherwise harmed in any way by their choice not to participate in prayer.

But this ruling does harm students with religious beliefs who want to practice the free exercise of their religion by seeking to engage in prayer at school events.

The way the law was left by the 5th Circuit is again to tell those students to hide their light under the proverbial bushel basket until they’re off-campus.

And once again, the church is separated further from the state.