July/August 2014 – The U.S. Supreme Court decided in May that prayers opening Greece, New York, city council meetings do not violate the U.S. Constitution. The American Humanist Association focused on a portion of the ruling calling for local governments to be fair to all theological views within their jurisdictions.
AHA began encouraging atheists across the country to volunteer to offer invocations at public venues. The AHA website describes an atheistic invocation: “It is essentially a short speech that calls upon the audience’s shared human values for assistance and authority in their public discourse. Unlike a traditional invocation, a secular invocation does not call upon a supernatural entity as a guide. It redirects our attention away from those supernatural entities towards those common human values that we do in fact share for guidance.”
